Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa: A Retrospective 9781496220837, 1496220838

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In Conversation with the 2010 Nobel Laureate
1. Genesis and Evolution of Captain Pantoja and the Special Services
2. The Return of the Monsters
3. From Miguel de Cervantes to César Moro
Life and Literature
4. Discreet and Injudicious Heroes in the Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa
5. A Life Worthy of a Novel
6. Vargas Llosa and Cervantes
History, Authority, and Ideology
7. A Poetics of Freedom
8. The Eye of the Beholder
9. Historical Fact/Historical Fiction in The Feast of the Goat
Other Tales
10. The Storyteller
11. Rubén Darío through Mario Vargas Llosa’s Looking Glass
12. Mario Vargas Llosa at the New York Public Library
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Ta l k i n g B o o k s w i t h M a r i o Va r g a s L l o s a

N e w H i s pa n i s m s Anne J. Cruz, series editor

TA L K I N G B O O K S W I T H MARIO VARGAS LLOSA A Retrospective

Edited by Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

U n i v e r s i t y o f N e b r a s ka P r e s s   Lincoln

© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Acknowledgment for the use of copyrighted material appears on page 198, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page. All opinions expressed belong to individual authors. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019054584 Set in Arno by Laura Buis. Designed by N. Putens. Frontispiece: Mario Vargas Llosa in his library in Barranco, Lima. Photo by Sergio Urday and courtesy of Mario Vargas Llosa.

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Raquel Chang-­R odríguez and Carlos Riobó In Conversation with the 2010 Nobel Laureate

1. Genesis and Evolution of Captain Pantoja and the Special Services  3 Mario Vargas Llosa 2. The Return of the Monsters 21 Mario Vargas Llosa 3. From Miguel de Cervantes to César Moro 35 Mario Vargas Llosa and Alonso Cueto Life and Literature

4. Discreet and Injudicious Heroes in the Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa 57 Efraín Kristal

5. A Life Worthy of a Novel 71 J. J. Armas Marcelo 6. Vargas Llosa and Cervantes: Modern Knights 93 Alonso Cueto History, Authority, and Ideology

7. A Poetics of Freedom 111 Carlos Franz 8. The Eye of the Beholder 135 Mónica Lavín 9. Historical Fact/Historical Fiction in The Feast of the Goat  149 Ángel L. Estévez Other Tales

10. The Storyteller: Narrating Latin America from Europe 173 Carlos Riobó 11. Rubén Darío through Mario Vargas Llosa’s Looking Glass 187 Raquel Chang-­R odríguez 12. Mario Vargas Llosa at the New York Public Library 203 Robert Dumont Contributors 219 Index 225

Illustrations



Mario Vargas Llosa in his library in Barranco, Lima frontispiece

1. Mario Vargas Llosa and ccny alumnus Oscar Hijuelos x 2. Mario Vargas Llosa at the honorary degree ceremony at the City College of New York xiii 3. Mario Vargas Llosa with Ignacio Olmos, former director of the Instituto Cervantes of New York xiv 4. Carlos Riobó, chair, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, offering welcome remarks at the inauguration of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa xv 5. Students at the inaugural seminar of the 2014 Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa xix 6. Mario Vargas Llosa visits his Cátedra in October 2015 and converses with Alonso Cueto 34 7. Efraín Kristal offering the inaugural lecture of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa 56 8. J. J. Armas Marcelo, Jaime Manrique, and Carlos Franz in conversation 72

9. Carlos Franz lecturing at the Instituto Cervantes during the 2016 Cátedra seminar 110 10. Mónica Lavín with her students in the 2017 Cátedra seminar 136 11. Daniel Shapiro, Mónica Lavín, and Ángel L. Estévez during events of the 2017 Cátedra 150 12. Efraín Kristal, Deborah Hartnett, and Carlos Riobó at inauguration of Cátedra Vargas Llosa 172 13. Mario Vargas Llosa with Raquel and Eugenio Chang-­Rodríguez 188 14. Mario Vargas Llosa at the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library 218

viii  list of illustrations

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation to entities and individuals at the City College of New York who helped create the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa and made this project possible since it began, several years ago: Presidents Lisa S. Coico and Vincent Boudreau; the Division of Humanities and the Arts; the Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts; and the faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures. We are grateful for the support of the Instituto Cervantes in New York, the Colonial Latin American Review, the Consulate of Peru in New York, the Consulate of Mexico in New York, the Mexican Institute of New York, and the staff of the University of Nebraska Press. We give special thanks to the following individuals who generously helped bring this project to completion: Bridget Barry, senior acquisitions editor, Joeth Zucco, senior project editor, Anne J. Cruz, director, Series on New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies, and Emily Wendell, assistant acquisitions editor, all at the University of Nebraska Press; Ignacio Olmos, former director, Instituto Cervantes in New York; Ambassador María Teresa Merino de Hart and Ambassador María Susana Landaveri, respectively former and current consul general of Peru in New York City; Ambassador Gustavo Meza Cuadra, former permanent representative of Peru at the United Nations, and his wife Sonia Balcazar; Ambassador Diego Gómez Pickering, former consul general of Mexico in New York City, Caterina Toscano Gómez Robledo, former executive director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York; Gabriella de Beer; Dorothy P. Snyder; John O’Neill; William Christian Jr.; Daniel E. Shapiro; Rosie Bedoya; and Fiorella Battistini. ix

1. Mario Vargas Llosa in conversation with Oscar Hijuelos, ccny alumnus and Pulitzer Prize winner (1989). Courtesy of the City College of New York.

Introduction Raquel Chang-­R odríguez and Carlos Riobó

The essays included in this collection are framed by Mario Vargas Llosa’s visits to the City College of New York (ccny), the creation of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa, or Mario Vargas Llosa Chair (2013) in his honor, and the interests of the Peruvian author in reading and books. Throughout these years, ccny has been the site of gatherings with the Nobel Laureate, his friends, literary critics, writers, and the public. They have all enriched our community as well as the understanding of Vargas Llosa’s work. Written by Vargas Llosa himself as well as by novelists and literary critics who have been associated with the Cátedra, the essays contained here comprise the twelve chapters of this book and are distributed in four sections. The first section, “In Conversation with the 2010 Nobel Laureate,” includes two lectures by Vargas Llosa and his exchange with another Peruvian author, Alonso Cueto, writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra in 2015. The contributions of Efraín Kristal, J. J. Armas Marcelo, and Alonso Cueto comprise the second section, “Life and Literature,” and illustrate the critical role of literature in Vargas Llosa’s biography. In “History, Authority and Ideology,” the third section, two key contemporary Spanish American writers, Carlos Franz and Mónica Lavín, and the critic Ángel L. Estévez analyze the Nobel Laureate’s major contributions to fiction. In the fourth and final section, “Other Tales,” Carlos Riobó, attends to The Storyteller (El hablador, 1987) an understudied novel; Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez examines Vargas Llosa’s early appreciation of Nicaraguan xi

poet Rubén Darío; and Robert Dumont recalls Vargas Llosa’s inspirations when in the New York Public Library. What follows offers a narrative of Mario Vargas Llosa’s relationship to the City College of New York and the circumstances in which most of these essays were originally presented. For over forty years, Mario Vargas Llosa has been a significant presence in the intellectual life of the City College of New York. His first visit was in 1977 at the invitation of the Latin American Studies Program to offer the Jacob C. Saposnekow Memorial Lecture. The writer discussed in Spanish the “inside” story of the genesis and evolution of his novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978). This talk, in translation, is the first chapter of our book. In it the Peruvian author reviews the decisions he took and the revisions he made in order to produce a text criticizing militarism through parody and humor. In the spring of 1993, Vargas Llosa was invited to lecture on our campus again. He had published yet another magisterial book—­Carta de batalla por “Tirant lo Blanc” (A defense of Tirant lo Blanc, 1991)—­about the chivalric novel written in Catalan by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell and first published in 1490. Various aspects of his lecture dealt with the importance of reviving this forgotten work and his efforts to do so. The audience loved Vargas Llosa’s evocation of its distant chivalric characters, knights, and maidens, and their daring deeds. A well-­remembered example: one of the ladies had such fair skin that when she drank red wine you could see it flowing through the veins of her neck! Mario Vargas Llosa returned to the City College several years later after he had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. On November 18, 2010, the City College of New York awarded him its highest degree, Doctor of Letters honoris causa. The ceremony was held in the Great Hall, which had been inaugurated in 1907 by another acclaimed writer, Mark Twain. As President Vincent Boudreau reminded us in his investiture speech of March 29, 2018, the creator of Huckleberry Finn and many other literary characters felt that America needed a degree in citizenship and that ccny was the “most appropriate place for that degree to be offered.” Mario Vargas Llosa’s presidential lecture on that day, “The Return of the Monsters,” is reminiscent of the concerns and aspirations expressed by the great North American writer xii Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

2. Mario Vargas Llosa entering the Great Hall at the City College of New York to receive the Doctor of Letters honoris causa. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

more than a century before. Vargas Llosa’s presentation, chapter 2 in this book, outlines the importance of mutual respect—­particularly respect for the other, for difference—­when seeking peace in a global world marked by pervasive prejudice, cataclysmic conflict, and mass displacement of populations. Vargas Llosa concluded his lecture with the story of the happy coexistence of a hippopotamus and a turtle and shared its moral: “Is it not a disgrace that two animals belonging to species as distinct as turtles and hippopotamuses could coexist, relate to one another, and love one another, whereas stupid human bipeds savagely kill each other as soon as they discover frequently insignificant differences between them?” In view of Mario Vargas Llosa’s literary prominence and his connection to the college, in 2013 ccny approved the creation of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. The first of its kind in the United States, it is housed at its Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures. The ccny Cátedra shares similar objectives with other Vargas Llosa Introduction  xiii

3. Mario Vargas Llosa with Ignacio Olmos, former director of the Instituto Cervantes of New York. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

Cátedras throughout the world: encouraging and promoting the study of contemporary literature; fostering an interest in reading and writing; supporting budding Ibero-­American writers; advancing the knowledge and dissemination of Vargas Llosa’s works; developing technological innovation models for education, research, and the dissemination of culture; and cooperating with prestigious institutions worldwide in order to promote new, related projects. One world institution with which our Cátedra has collaborated consistently is the Instituto Cervantes New York (icny). Thanks to the excellent relationship we have shared with its former and current executive director, respectively Ignacio Olmos and Richard Bueno Hudson, the Cátedra holds one session and a public lecture in the icny’s elegant and renowned facilities every year. At the inaugural ceremony of the Cátedra in City College’s Great Hall on November 4, 2013, Mario Vargas Llosa—­in the presence of ccny president Lisa S. Coico and J. J. Armas Marcelo, director of the international consortium of Mario Vargas Llosa Cátedras—­signed the agreement. xiv Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

4. Carlos Riobó, chair, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, offering welcoming remarks during the inauguration (2013) of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

Then Professor Efraín Kristal offered the inaugural lecture, “Discreet and Injudicious Heroes in the Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa,” which is chapter 4 of this book. With intelligence and flair he commented on the singular characters created by the Peruvian author: Santiago Zavala in Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975); Lituma in Lituma en los Andes (1993; Death in the Andes, 1996); Flora Tristán in El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise, 2004); and Roger Casement in El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012). He described the sense of doom they feel as they analyze the social order—­or rather disorder—­ and their inability to meet the challenges they face. Kristal contrasted these characters with Felícito Yanaqué, the protagonist of El héroe discreto (2013; The Discreet Hero, 2015) who is completely different: someone ready to face circumstances and to cope with the world as it is. In his lecture Kristal offered a perceptive analysis of Vargas Llosa’s ability to create a narrative plot that leads us through the many events of his novels. His presentation, Introduction  xv

which opens the second section of this book, elicited many questions and laid the foundation for seminars and lectures to come. Attended by students, faculty, and New Yorkers from many walks of life and framed by the Great Hall, it was a memorable evening at the City College. Since its inception in 2013, the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa has offered seminars and brought to the campus major Hispanic writers. Vargas Llosa again visited his ccny Cátedra in October 2015, engaging with students and faculty and participating in a conversation with visiting writer-­in-­residence Alonso Cueto. Since in that year the Hispanic world was commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the second part of Cervantes’s universally acclaimed novel Don Quixote, the seminar offered through the Cátedra was dedicated to Cervantes’s masterpiece and its influence on Vargas Llosa’s fiction. Cueto and Vargas Llosa engaged in a conversation, reproduced here in its entirety as chapter 3, that, while having Don Quixote at its center, extended to North American literature and William Faulkner as well as to Peruvian literature and the surrealist poet César Moro—­a secondary character, by the way, in Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros. In his lecture, “Vargas Llosa and Cervantes: Modern Knights,” which is chapter 6 of this book, Cueto expands on the Spanish writer’s influence on the Peruvian author’s fiction, particularly through its characters and the moral code they share. In 2014 the novelist J. J. Armas Marcelo was the first writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra. His keynote presentation, reproduced here in chapter 5, reviewed significant events in the life of Mario Vargas Llosa while underscoring his constant passion for writing, for books. The essays by Kristal, Armas Marcelo, and Cueto are grouped together in the section titled “Life and Literature,” which shows how the latter shapes the former in Mario Vargas Llosa’s biography. Carlos Franz—­the first Latin American (Chile) to win the Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa Prize for Best Spanish Language Novel published in the years 2014–­16 in Spanish America and Spain­—w ­ as the writer-­in-­residence at ccny in our Cátedra’s fourth year (2016). In Franz’s keynote lecture, his choice of Vargas Llosa’s early novels (the first five) allowed him to focus on the Nobel winner’s political trajectory through a study of key characters. Franz’s essay, “A Poetics of Freedom,” chapter xvi Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

7 of this book, revisits La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966), La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968), Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), Pantaleón y las vi-​ sitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982) to discuss their protagonists and their relationship to liberal ideas. Franz also traces Vargas Llosa’s political pronouncements through his literary career and shows how he revised his way of thinking while always keeping true to his liberal philosophy. In 2017 the Mexican writer Mónica Lavín became writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra Vargas Llosa. Her lecture is this book’s chapter 8, “The Eye of the Beholder.” Lavín relies on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Vargas Llosa’s interest in that novel to analyze the formal development of perspective and characters in La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001), about the Dominican ruler Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Lavín identifies Vargas Llosa’s ability to inhabit the perspectives of his main characters as “the organizing principle of his novel.” She refers to this power as “the crystal-­ball effect” when she attempts to explain narrative art to her students. Her essay concludes that Vargas Llosa is able to tease apart Trujillo’s discourses of dominance—­his unchecked power—­by simultaneously creating a framework of “expansion, psychological time, and counterpoint.” This section of the book is rounded out by the literary critic Ángel L. Estévez, whose essay, “Historical Fact/Historical Fiction in The Feast of the Goat,” is chapter 9. A ccny faculty member and regular participant of the Cátedra, Estévez responds in his essay to the immediate reception of The Feast of the Goat, with “special emphasis on the dynamics between the intertwining of history and literature, with regard to the historical novel.” Through an exploration of the conventions and formal limits of history and literature, and a review of the positive and negative receptions of the novel, the essay delves into the thorny issue of truth within fiction, a matter with which Vargas Llosa himself, as a writer of historical fiction, has wrestled in his own essay, “The Truth of Lies.” In the fourth section of this volume, “Other Tales,” Carlos Riobó and Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez analyze, respectively, one of Vargas Llosa’s less-­explored novels and the writer’s early attraction to the poetry of Introduction  xvii

Rubén Darío. Riobó’s chapter, “The Storyteller: Narrating Latin America from Europe,” considers the 1987 novel El hablador (The Storyteller, 1989) in the light of the literary tradition known as the “novela de la selva,” or jungle narrative. Riobó explores Latin America’s quandary in desiring to know itself through its indigenous cultures while simultaneously wanting to refashion itself in the image of Europe. At the same time, Europe, in turn, was embarking on a voyage into the developing world in order to find a simulacrum of its own origins. In chapter 11, Chang-­Rodríguez connects the Nicaraguan master of Modernismo, Rubén Darío, and the young Vargas Llosa in her “Rubén Darío through Mario Vargas Llosa’s Looking Glass.” As it turns out, Vargas Llosa wrote his undergraduate thesis at the National University of San Marcos on Darío and his style. Through an analysis of the Peruvian’s study of the Nicaraguan poet’s early works, Chang-­Rodríguez traces Vargas Llosa’s burgeoning interest in the craft of writing. We understand his insightful study of Darío’s initial period while getting a glimpse of the young author’s development of the fundamentals of writing. Recognizing Vargas Llosa’s love for libraries—­in his travels he has visited the main bibliotecas of major cities—­and the fundamental role they have played in his development as a writer, the book devotes its concluding chapter 12 to “Mario Vargas Llosa at the New York Public Library” by Robert Dumont, a fiction writer and former librarian at that bastion of reading and research freely open to all. We get a rare look into the Peruvian Nobel’s craft, as Dumont shares with us some of Vargas Llosa’s writerly idiosyncrasies and colorful anecdotes of his time researching in the Rose Main Reading Room for one of his novels in the mid-­1980s and again in 2008. An aspiring fiction writer himself at the time, Dumont recounts how he struck up a friendship with Vargas Llosa over book requests and lunches and received invaluable advice from the master about his use of vasos comunicantes (communicating vessels) and other literary concerns. We trust that readers will both enjoy and benefit from going through the essays collected in this retrospective of Mario Vargas Llosa’s creative activity at the City College of New York, as well as the events of his xviii Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

5. Students at the inaugural seminar of the 2014 Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

Cátedra. The various contributions place literature at the center of the cultural debate, take us to different worlds, endeavor to make accessible some of the complexities of Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s writings and to underscore his constant passion for books. Readers will come away with a greater understanding of Vargas Llosa’s creative process as well as a deeper appreciation for the impact his body of work has had on other great contemporary writers throughout the world. At the core of the City College of New York’s mission is accessibility to an excellent education that will open doors and transform the lives of its students. Mario Vargas Llosa’s close relationship with the college and his Cá-​ tedra’s development there have gone a long way toward providing the level of excellence and accessibility our students so deserve. This book is a testament to that as well. Introduction  xix

Ta l k i n g B o o k s w i t h M a r i o Va r g a s L l o s a

In Conversation with the 2010 Nobel Laureate

chapter 1

Genesis and Evolution of Captain Pantoja and the Special Services Mario Vargas Llosa

First I would like to thank the previous speakers for their words of welcome and say how pleased I am to open Latin American Week at the City College of New York. It is really very moving for a Latin writer, and indeed for every Latin American, to realize the importance that our world with its languages and culture has assumed in the United States. I believe that this week at the City College will be recorded as part of that growing presence of Latin America in the United States. The subject of my talk, which will be more informative than academic, is the novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978). In my talk I will try to share with you a collection of anecdotes along with the true story behind the story that the novel relates—­something the critics probably cannot give you. The background material is the only area of my own books in which I feel entirely secure. I believe that the readers and critics are better able to interpret and analyze the works of a writer than he is himself. The writer is really not able to differentiate the text from the context, and the confusion between what he said and what he believed that he said can be fatal for a critical analysis of a work. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is set almost entirely in Iquitos, the main city of the Peruvian jungle, and it takes place sometime in the fifties. It is a story that tells how one day Pantaleón Pantoja, an officer of the Quartermaster Corps of the Peruvian Army, was summoned by his superiors and charged with an unusual mission: the installation of a discreet 3

and disguised brothel to serve the border garrisons of the entire Amazon region. The novel relates how the officer carried out this assignment so efficiently that it ended up by creating many more problems for the Peruvian Army than those it had wished to resolve through the establishment of this brothel, euphemistically named the “Special Service.” Here you have, in very few words, the plot of the novel. Pantaleón y las visitadoras, like every work of fiction that I have written, has as its source something personal. For me, the use of my imagination and fantasy, which for many writers is the basis and the original stimulus of the creative process, only comes into play secondarily. The first creative stimulus for me is always personal experience—­people I have known, situations I have lived through, things about which I have heard firsthand accounts. For some unknown and mysterious reason there are certain facts of reality that have affected me deeply and have remained in my memory as small obsessions and, starting from these, my imagination and fantasy have little by little built a work of fiction. This was the case for my previous novels and is also the case for Pantaleón y las visitadoras. The Seed of the Story

I believe that the earliest source of this novel was a trip that I took to the Peruvian jungle in 1958. It was a region of Peru that I was not familiar with, and this short trip showed me a new face of my own country. It revealed to me a country very different from the Peru of the coast or of the mountains. It was, on the one hand, a much more primitive world in which there were still tribes that lived in the Stone Age and, on the other hand, a country of extraordinary luxuriance and amazing fertility. This was in enormous contrast to the other two regions of Peru. It was a colorful world, a world in which adventure, sometimes extraordinary and fantastic, could be the reality of every day. On this trip, which I took just by chance, a chance that turned out to be truly formidable, I accompanied a scientific expedition headed by a Mexican anthropologist who was doing research on the tribes of the Upper Marañón River. The trip gave me, without my realizing it at that time, a series of experiences 4  mario vargas llosa

and images that later would make up the raw material of my second novel, La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968). During this trip we stopped in many little towns in the region of the Upper Marañón. We also stopped in some villages populated by indigenous groups as well as in towns inhabited by Christians who were the Westernized people of the jungle. They were very humble towns and all very isolated, one from the other. We traveled on a small hydroplane that always landed on the shores of the town. Sometimes we spent one or two nights in each of these places, and that gave us the opportunity to converse and become friendly with the people for whom we constituted a novelty. They received us with open arms and with hospitality that is so characteristic of the people of the jungle. In these conversations we learned of their problems and listened to many anecdotes, some dramatic and others very amusing. One of the constant themes during this trip through the towns of the Upper Marañón River, something that we picked up in practically every place we visited, was a complaint. Without fail, the townspeople told us of their dissatisfaction with the soldiers. The problem was that the Peruvian Army had installed many garrisons to patrol the borders of the Amazon region. These garrisons were situated in very remote and solitary places and, naturally, when the soldiers were on leave, they would go down to small towns and villages on the rivers. Their relationship with the inhabitants was very poor. And there was a great deal of tension among the people and bitterness toward the soldiers. The reason was that the soldiers used to molest the women of the towns. They annoyed them, flirted with them, made love to them, raped them, and made them pregnant. This created tremendous anger and hostility toward the soldiers who, while on leave, became a danger for all the Christian women. We heard that petitions had been circulated and protests filed. In one place they even told us that a committee headed by the town authorities had gone to Iquitos where the headquarters of the Fifth Command that controlled the entire Amazon region were located. They did so in order to lodge an official protest against the abuses of the soldiers that were creating inordinate difficulties genesis and evolution  5

in the towns. This is the source of my personal experience, which later would give rise to Pantaleón y las visitadoras. Just a few days after that trip, I left Peru and lived in Europe for some time. Seven years later, I returned for a short period, a large part of which I spent in the Amazon region traveling through that very same area that I had gotten to know in 1958. During those intervening years I had written a novel in which I made use of many recollections and images from that expedition into the Amazon. When the novel was almost finished I decided to go back to those places to see if, although I had not intended to write either a geographic or sociological document, I had not overidealized that world on which my imagination had been working during those previous years. My novel told a story in which the matter of the soldiers of the border garrisons who, on their days off, became public enemy number one for the women of the Amazonian towns, did not appear at all. I then traveled more or less through the same places that I had visited in 1958 with one of the members of the first expedition. In these very same towns, to our great surprise, we now heard a different but constant complaint from the inhabitants. They all continued to complain about the soldiers, but the reasons for their complaint had changed. The Army and the Special Service

This time it was because the soldiers were enjoying a special privilege of which they, the townspeople, were envious. This privilege was embodied in an institution known by a strange name: the Special Service. And so it was that in the different towns, through anecdotes that varied somewhat but which had a common thread, my companion and I were able to reconstruct the story. What was this Special Service? It was a service that provided prostitutes who came to the border garrisons directly from Iquitos in boats supplied by the navy or in planes or hydroplanes supplied by the air force. The convoys of these women, called “specialists,” traveled directly to the garrisons and were quartered there. They rendered a service to the defenders of our country that you can well imagine and then returned directly to Iquitos. They went back and forth under the very 6  mario vargas llosa

noses of the inhabitants, ignoring the civilian population and making them envious. Now all the complaints revolved around this service. Why did only the soldiers have this privilege? Why could the military enjoy these “specialists” and the civilian population not? It was very interesting because through these two anecdotes an entire story unfolded. The Peruvian Army had found itself facing a very serious problem. The rapes and other unsavory incidents had been creating a tense situation between the military and the civilian population. The army, therefore, decided to resolve the problem of the soldiers who, for the most part, were not from the Amazon region but were brought in from the coastal and mountain areas. Cut off from their families, they lived in solitude, in a state of forced celibacy. Besides, the Amazon region was hot, luxuriant, and stimulating. Therefore, by creating the Special Service, the army resolved the problem of the soldiers and their celibacy. Now there was a new problem for the army. The civilian population was no longer fearful for the safety and honor of their women, but this other conflict had arisen. From the moment I picked up this second anecdote I felt the urge to write something, to use these two anecdotes as the basis of a story. But above all, what was most stimulating for me was not so much the fact that the army had created this service, but to imagine, to try to guess, the process through which it had been created. I had some idea about what the army was like because as a boy I had attended a military school (the Leoncio Prado) for two years. I had acquired some direct knowledge of that rigorously stratified world where personal initiative and spontaneity did not exist and where everything followed strictly established procedures. And, therefore, to visualize what the creation of the Special Service was like in such a rigid institution was most amusing and stimulating from the point of view of my fantasy and imagination. I pictured more than anything or anyone else that officer who one fine day was commissioned by his superiors to set up a prostitution service. I began to imagine that the army had most likely entrusted this mission to an officer most closely related to an activity of that sort. That service would surely have been the Quartermaster Corps, the administrative arm of the military. genesis and evolution  7

I imagined that they had had to seek out the most prudish and reserved officer. Since he would be in close contact with all sorts of temptations, it would have been a very risky mission in the hands of a roguish officer. Therefore, by reviewing all the service records of the officers of the Quartermaster Corps, they most likely selected the most puritanical and sober officer on whom the Peruvian army could depend. And it was very amusing for me to think of the complications that the officer who one fine day received the charge of creating the Special Service would have had to face in his professional and family life. Clearly, this could not be created in broad daylight nor could it function like the other branches of the Peruvian Armed Forces. Everything had to be camouflaged and be very covert. Most likely this officer had been ordered to act as a civilian and to conceal his military status. His offices were probably located very far from the other administrative offices of the military. It was very amusing to visualize the first steps that this lieutenant, captain, or major took to set up a prostitution service and how he made his contacts with the world of prostitution of Iquitos and with the prostitutes and their procurers. And then it became extraordinarily stimulating to meditate on how all of this had generated a work of literature. I recalled from my own experience as a cadet in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy that kind of literature, composed of dispatches, passwords, proclamations, and long speeches. Then I began to picture this officer informing his superiors about the various steps he was taking to set up the service and about the functioning of the service itself. I tried to visualize in what form these problems, so far removed from the military experience, could fit in to the formulas, clichés, and set phrases that are so characteristic of military rhetoric. From Anecdote to Fiction

All of this was spinning around in my head. It was a theme that led my mind to wander and, as of that second trip into the jungle, I planned to write something based on these anecdotes. What I decided was to write the story, fictitious of course, of that imaginary officer who had organized 8  mario vargas llosa

the Special Service. I foresaw a rather short narrative, a short story or a novelette. I believed, for some unknown reason, that it ought to be a narrative in dialogue. Perhaps it was because I had discovered in a previous novel, Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), and also in a story prior to that novel, the enormous possibilities of dialogue. The previous novel was composed entirely of a conversation between two characters that lasted many hours and through which all the events of that story transpired. The fact is that I was fascinated by dialogue and I decided that the story of the officer Pantaleón and his Special Service ought to be told exclusively through the voices of its protagonists. In this novel, that could be a single conversation from the beginning to end, one would follow the evolution of Pantaleón and the development of the Special Service from the day that the army decided to create it until some two or three years later, when it decided to discontinue the service because of the many problems that it caused. And so I began to work. I wrote a first draft of the story more or less following my plan—­a dialogue that disregarded all respect for time and space. It was a dialogue that constituted a single unit but which lasted three years. It did not take place in a single local but jumped from Iquitos to Lima and from Iquitos to different garrisons on the border. It was a dialogue that was exceptionally free in every sense of the word. I had one problem from the very beginning and that was the tone in which to narrate the story. Until that time I had written books in which humor had hardly appeared at all. Perhaps it had appeared tangentially, relegated to a minor role in each one of my stories. I had done that deliberately, at least after my first novel. I had a great distrust of humor, that is to say, humor in literature, not in real life of course. It seemed to me that humor stood in the way of the literary material, that it immediately erected a barrier between the reader and the text, and that it constituted a kind of grimace behind the characters and the world of the novel. To my mind, it was a way of letting the readers know that what they were reading was not so, that it was a joke, simply an excuse, an opportunity to make them laugh and to amuse them. So for the kind of novels that I genesis and evolution  9

wanted to write, novels in which the reader should become completely carried away and fascinated by the action of the story itself, novels that I wanted my readers to read as I had read adventure stories as a child and which I still remembered vividly, it seemed to me that humor was exceedingly dangerous and should be avoided. In writing the story of Pantaleón, I had meant more or less to follow this norm, but then from the very beginning I was struck by a contradiction. The story that I wished to relate, the story of the Special Service and the situations in which Pantaleón was involved, was amusing. The story was simply a funny story. Handled in a serious vein, it just would not work well. There would be no credibility, and it would lack all powers of persuasion. I myself felt the material to be false and the story completely inauthentic. And so it was for practical reasons that I had to modify these ideas about the role of humor in literature. Reconsidering Humor

I decided that that this story could only be told humorously because it was essentially funny. In my second version of the novel, humor appeared and in large measure. The discovery of the possibilities that humor offered was very stimulating. Different levels of reality and an infinite amount of human, individual, and social material could, thanks to humor, be incorporated and converted into fiction. I decided that the humor of this story ought not to be overly sophisticated or refined, but that it should be in tune with the commonness of the characters and the world in which they moved, a kind of coarse, direct, and crude humor. Although this element was new for me, it made the creative process so much more bearable. Pantaleón y las visitadoras is the only novel that I have written in a state of euphoria from beginning to end. All my other books have been at the cost of enormous effort. For me, writing has been a difficult, lonely, and even bitter experience with periods of depression and sometimes with a feeling of impotence. I found that I had to counteract all of these feelings with my willpower, something which was most difficult and depressing. With Pantaleón y las visitadoras that never happened to me. I began to work 10  mario vargas llosa

and every day I got up from my desk in the same good mood. Sometimes while I was working on inventing the episodes of the Special Service, I would laugh to myself, and the writing was a kind of continuous game. When I finished this version of the novel, very different from that original, serious story, I was very dissatisfied for many reasons. One of the reasons was that the dialogue form that I had followed religiously in the second version, as I had in the first, kept the story on an excessively abstract level. It seemed to be without any concrete substance, and everything was reduced to a sort of intellectual parable. And that is precisely the kind of literature that I can respect but that I am not interested in writing. That purely abstract character of the novel seemed like an intellectual exercise, and I became disillusioned with my own work, unconvinced of its impact. The Setting of the Story

I thought that perhaps what was missing was a greater presence of the jungle, of the setting of the story, which, because it was told only through the voices of its characters, was very vague and almost nonexistent. Therefore, I took another trip to the Amazon region and this time I visited the area of Iquitos almost exclusively. Besides, I was curious to see if the Special Service still existed and if from reality itself I could gather some facts, some new and authentic details that would be useful to me. I stayed in Iquitos for a few days, and the trip was truly fortunate for the novel that ensued. I discovered that, in fact, the Special Service still existed and, thanks to a friend, I even had the opportunity of going into the garrison from which the convoys of “specialists” usually set out. The colonel of the garrison, a very nice man, invited us to go for a motorboat ride; it turned out that the corporal who operated it had often transported convoys of “specialists.” He was able to provide practical and concrete facts about the service, including the fees charged by the “specialists.” That is how I learned that the fee varied according to the rank of the officer or soldier serviced. I also found out that these charges were deducted directly from the salary bonuses of the soldiers. And so it was that the “specialists” collected their fees through the administrative service of the garrisons genesis and evolution  11

themselves. These details constituted a series of very picturesque and funny facts that were quite helpful to me. Brother Francisco and the Goddess Mita

But above all, the trip was very useful in another way that I had not foreseen. When I arrived in Iquitos, a very picturesque character called Brother Francisco had just passed through. He was a kind of itinerant holy man, most likely of Brazilian origin, who traveled through the Colombian, Brazilian, and Peruvian Amazon region erecting crosses. Every time he arrived at a village or town, Brother Francisco would set up a cross, and then many pious people came to hear him deliver sermons at the foot of these crosses. Brother Francisco was a sort of visionary and, although I am not certain what his theories were, a whole religious sect had developed around him. Sometimes many people traveled with Brother Francisco who always moved about in a raft or on foot. Near Lake Morona, next to the city of Iquitos where he had just been, there was a large wooden cross with candles that burned for twenty-­four hours. Several brothers and sisters—­I am not sure what they were called—­ worshippers or followers of Brother Francisco were stationed at the foot of the cross and one could see them praying during the day and sometimes at night. I was told that while Brother Francisco was there he had preached several sermons outdoors near Lake Morona and that he had attracted a truly large crowd. I even saw some pictures of him. He was a mature man, elderly, who went about dressed in a white habit and wore a very long beard. The moment I saw this and listened to these anecdotes and viewed the cross near Lake Morona, I realized that I had to incorporate a story that dealt with a religious sect into the story of Pantaleón and the “specialists.” Perhaps it was because these experiences revived something hidden in my memory. Several years earlier I had been in Puerto Rico. I had spent a few months at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, during which I met many people and did many things. One of the people that I met and who became vividly engraved in my memory was the goddess Mita. In a 12  mario vargas llosa

San Juan neighborhood on certain days of the week I had noticed men and women dressed entirely in white, right down to their shoelaces. That aroused my curiosity and, when I inquired about it, I was told that they were the “mitas,” the followers of Mita who was both the high priestess of the religion and the goddess herself. They explained to me that in that neighborhood practically all the property belonged to this sect, and that the house of the goddess Mita was located right there. Through the good offices of some lady friends I managed to get an audience with her and we spent some truly unforgettable hours together. Mita lived in a modest house and she received us on a day of a religious ceremony. There were long lines of people stretching through the street, and during the entire interview men and women kept on coming up to the house. We were on the second floor in a kind of foyer, and there was a constant stream of people who came up to Mita in a state of fervor and reverence. They kissed her hands and gave her presents. The gifts began to cover the floor, and one was able to sense that they had already filled the adjoining rooms. It was very impressive to see the state of adoration with which the faithful approached Mita. And it was also extraordinary to observe Mita. She was a woman with a certain air of freedom about her, perhaps fifty or fifty-­five years old, rather heavy, probably of very humble origin and totally imbued with her role. The things she explained about her religion and beliefs were not at all convincing and seemed extremely primitive and naïve to us. But on the other hand, Mita the character, was truly convincing. There was no doubt that she was a person who literally believed everything she said. What impressed me most was the distance that she maintained between herself and the others, between herself and us, between herself and the people who came to leave gifts, and between herself and the twelve apostles who were seated behind her. One could tell that there was an invisible barrier that could not be overcome between this woman and everything else. She observed all those tributes that were coming in from a distance, as through a body of water, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She ended up leaving us with an eerie sensation. genesis and evolution  13

After this interview in which Mita more or less told us her story, she invited us to attend the religious ceremony. It took place in a kind of temple, a big coliseum facing her house. I had never seen participation in a religious ceremony equivalent to this one among the “mitas.” It was a long ceremony lasting about an hour or more. But not for one instant, not for one second, did the tension, the fervor, the active participation of those present, subside. They sang and danced on the site of the temple, and this created a great deal of communal atmosphere. But during the times in which Mita spoke, when she addressed her worshippers, the air became electrified, and I myself felt a very strange sensation. I can remember a moment when Mita picked up her handkerchief and threw it toward the crowd saying: “This handkerchief is the bearer of good health.” There was a mad rush of hands and arms to catch the handkerchief. My friends and I who were seated in the first row, looked at each other as if to ask, what would we do if the handkerchief fell into our hands? Should we just convert? It was a very interesting experience indeed, and I planned to write a novel someday that would make use of these people and these images. But the project had never materialized. I had some notes; I had something about a religious sect. Latin America, as you may know, is greatly prone to these kinds of sects, and particularly the tropical world of the Amazon region. Upon arriving in Iquitos and finding traces of Brother Francisco, my recollections of Mita and her followers were revived and with them the old ambition of writing something sometime about a religious sect. All of this material became incorporated into Pantaleón y las visitadoras. Perhaps the introduction of this extraneous tale into the story of Pantaleón and the “specialists” would make the novel less abstract; perhaps it would anchor the story in that hot, pristine, and somewhat naïve reality of the Amazon region. And so I did precisely that. When I began to revise the novel, to write a new version, I introduced as a contrast to the story of the Special Service the story of a religious sect that would run parallel to it. I retained the name of Brother Francisco, but I invented a good deal, if not all, of the sect’s liturgy and beliefs. I decided that both stories should run a similar 14  mario vargas llosa

course and that, in order to establish the contrast between the two, the second story should be one of concrete facts. If the story of Pantaleón and the “specialists” was amusing, funny, and humorous, then the story of Brother Francisco’s religious sect should not be funny or humorous at all. Perhaps there could be an occasional amusing element, but it would be basically a tragic and dramatic story. Maybe in this manner, both the abstract and the concrete, through contact with one another, could create a more credible middle ground and suggest more of an idea of normality. Military Literature and Rhetoric

At the same time that I decided to incorporate these additions into the story of Pantaleón, I also decided to make other changes. I was no longer convinced about having the narration entirely in dialogue and that everything should be presented only through the spoken word of the protagonists. Ever since I had written my first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966), set in a military school, I had a feeling of nostalgia. It seemed to me that in it I had underutilized a very rich component of the military experience: military literature and rhetoric. All those elements that permeate military dispatches, reports, speeches, and regulations. When writing Pantaleón y las visitadoras, I decided to use these elements thinking that perhaps their incorporation would also help counteract the excessively abstract nature of a story told exclusively through the dialogue of its characters. Since the new version of the novel was quite advanced at that time, I reflected upon it in the following way. The human voice, the words spoken by the protagonists of the story, represent the most vivid, direct, and spontaneous form of language. Perhaps it would be interesting to alternate the perspective of the story between the most vivid and direct form of language and its antithesis, the most lifeless form. What speech is more lifeless than administrative jargon, the language of dispatches, memoranda, regulation? What form of speech is more lifeless than that language made up exclusively of clichés, platitudes, and traditional formulas that channel and tear each idea inside of a rigid pattern? It seemed to me that these two forms of language—­the genesis and evolution  15

most vivid, the spoken language, and the most lifeless, the language of memoranda and military dispatches—­could create in the same manner as the two anecdotes of the plot, a middle ground that would somehow approximate normality and give the impression of feigned naturalness. That is how it came about that in this version of the novel I incorporated all those military dispatches that its readers probably remember. Multiple Perspectives and Linguistic Repertoires

The story of Pantaleón is told simultaneously on two levels: through the dialogues of the characters and through the reports that Captain Pantaleón Pantoja sends to or receives from his superiors. While working with the military dispatches, probably through the powers of association, I began to incorporate into the novel other sorts of documents, other types of dead language—­administrative and bureaucratic letters, scripts of radio programs, newspapers, articles. I believed that these different forms of language were going to move the story a little toward some of the media that had traditionally been looked down upon. For example, I could, through the use of these media, describe the repercussions that the story had in Iquitos and in all of Peruvian society as well as the ways in which the story of the Special Service had surprised, amused, and traumatized the other people. I did this through one of the characters of the story who was a newspaper man, and also through the direct presentation to the reader of those documents that in the civilian world and in nonmilitary language were the equivalent of the dispatches and administrative reports of Pantaleón Pantoja. Thus, the story was becoming enlarged and touched on different levels of reality. It was being created, invented, and told from different perspectives and different realities. Pantaleón’s Dreams

I soon discovered that, contrary to my own intentions of writing a short narration, the story had expanded and grown. In other words, I had shown again the fundamental importance of quantity, of the purely numerical element of narrative creation. All narrations tend, one might 16  mario vargas llosa

say philosophically, to prolong themselves, to grow, expand, and become longer and longer. Even in this brief and compact story of the Special Service, that phenomenon had ended up by asserting itself. At this stage in the creation of the novel, since the story was already unfolding at the level of dialogue, at the level of official documents, newspapers, and letters, and at the level of the purely physical description of the scenery, why not incorporate into it another level of reality, that of dreams, of the pure human conscience. And so, when the novel was almost finished, I incorporated some dreams of Pantaleón Pantoja because I thought that perhaps it would be interesting to give the story this other perspective, this other dimension. The story had profoundly affected the life of this man and undoubtedly must have modified his entire being, even his dreams. It would then be interesting to show how the story of Pantaleón was lived and experienced purely at the level of dreams. The novel contains five dreams from five very different moments of Pantaleón Pantoja’s life. My idea was that, through the use of that diffuse symbolic and nondidactic language that is the language of dreams, all that happened in objective reality, in everyday life, would be projected and made real. For example, one of the big problems that Pantaleón has is the schizophrenic nature of his life, the duplication of personalities. For the prostitutes and their procurers and for the soldiers of the garrisons, Pantaleón Pantoja is a sort of pimp of the Amazon region. Besides, he also has a family life that is in direct contradiction to what he does. Pantaleón is forced to lie. He has made his family believe that he is an officer carrying out an intelligence mission on account of which he has to visit houses of prostitution, to go out at night and to mix with people from the world of prostitution. These constant lies have split his personality. They have even projected themselves into the most intimate aspects of his private life. On the one hand, he is a model husband and, on the other, he is the lover of the star “specialist,” la Brasileira. One evening this duplication, this division that is his life, projects itself into a dream. It is a dream in which the whole world, mirroring Pantaleón, undergoes a kind of generalized parthenogenesis. Everything multiplies and divides; everything is one genesis and evolution  17

and its double. The whole world, not only people and things, but even situations and thoughts, seem to be imbued with a strange and terrifying need to duplicate themselves. This is the essence of the five dreams, which were the last elements that I incorporated into the novel. I might point out in passing that they are the least understood parts of the novel and, at one and the same time, the parts which have been the most severely faulted by the critics who have not really comprehended the purpose, origin, and nature of these dreams. I indicated before that the novel was unfolding on various levels of reality, but that one of them, the objective and purely descriptive level, was not depicted as yet. I had wanted to eliminate entirely from Pantaleón y las visitadoras all impersonal and objective descriptions. Since I wanted the story to be completely in dialogue form, there could not be an impersonal narrator that would observe and describe the atmosphere, the surroundings, or the clothing of the characters. I stuck to this aim, this idea, until I got to the final version of the novel. However, having accepted the concept that this novel should break away from a narrow and rigid structure and that it should project different spheres of reality in order to perfect itself and to fully materialize as a work of fiction, I felt that it would be deceptive not to mention the environment, not to speak of the scenery, not to describe the physical surroundings in which the action took place. A New Structure

I do not remember clearly when the idea of incorporating this type of objective material into the story was linked to another idea. I had always been annoyed by the writer’s use of verbs of declaration to accompany direct quotations. In this novel my annoyance developed into a truly structural and creative problem because a story told entirely in dialogue has so many instances of such verbs. They are just statements of reference that briefly, but unavoidably, paralyze the action. They are simply to indicate who is speaking or who is listening. Let us take as an example, “Good morning,” said John, “I am going out.” To say “said John” once is almost 18  mario vargas llosa

negligible, but if in a novel it is repeated two hundred or five hundred times, one is incorporating an entire body of material that in a certain way is lifeless. Their function is infinitely weaker, from the point of view of the effectiveness of the fiction, than everything that is contained inside the quotation marks. These verbs of declaration had always annoyed me and, in a previous novel, called Los cachorros (1967; The Cubs, 1975), I had avoided using them in the prescribed manner. But here in Pantaleón y las visitadoras I did not know how to do it. I am, of course, speaking about one of the early versions, either the first or the second. At that moment, when I decided that the novel should also have objective descriptions of its setting, I somehow associated this element with the problem of how to deal with the verbs of declaration. This is how the new structure came about. Why not utilize the space reserved for the verbs of declaration that perform a purely informative function in a different and more creative fashion? Why not occupy that space with something more than the mere indication of who is speaking or who is listening? Why not fill in that space with completely new material that is so rich that it will perform a function equally as important and decisive as the material of the direct quotation? And that was how I decided to utilize the space generally reserved for verbs of declaration to fit into that entire level of reality that up to that point had been left out. Specifically, I meant the physical and geographical world as well as references to the clothing and movements of the characters—­all that was exclusively scenery, and all that referred to the external world. I began looking for ways to make this possible. After exploring different procedures, I came to the conclusion that the reader could be conditioned or familiarized with this new element if it were introduced gradually. For example, if at the beginning of a chapter, in that space traditionally occupied by verbs of declaration, there were to appear brief references that distracted the reader only momentarily, he or she could become accustomed to these distractions because they would form an important and complementary part of the story. Later on, once the reader genesis and evolution  19

was conditioned, one could progressively expand that kind of material. With a thoroughly conditioned reader who would not question the text, the author could incorporate into these spaces an enormous amount of material. In other words, between the beginning and end of a direct quotation there could exist, within that space reserved for a reference to the speaker, a world apart from the story. A character could wake up, go out, have an accident, go to the hospital, undergo surgery, return home, convalesce three weeks, and then the character could finish the statement that he had begun before all this happened. If the reader were sufficiently acclimated to the method, he or she could accept it. And in this way, inside the spaces set apart for verbs of declaration, what is generally lifeless material could serve a truly creative function. This has been one instance in which the purely structural work has turned out to be fascinating and complementary to the strictly narrative task. The exploration of this technique proved to be as interesting as its reason for being in the narration, which, as I previously indicated, was the need to incorporate into it one more element of reality. With all these changes and modifications Pantaleón y las visitadoras was finally published. It ended up being something very different from the original idea of a brief story in dialogue that would fictionalize the true history of the Special Service. Note

Lecture to open Latin American Week in the spring of 1977. Translated from the Spanish by Gabriella de Beer and Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez.

20  mario vargas llosa

chapter 2

The Return of the Monsters Mario Vargas Llosa

At the end of World War II, a sigh of relief spread across the Western world: the struggle had been ferocious and the death toll appalling, but humanity had been freed from the Nazism that had enslaved it under Hitler’s bloody tyranny. The world would learn a lesson; countries would never again be seduced by fanatical leaders; and they would reject perverse ideologies like the nationalism and racism—­and especially the antisemitism—­that had provoked the recent catastrophe. A period of peace and coexistence would begin, in which democracy and the culture of freedom would thrive. It was a rather hasty optimism. Along with democratic, liberal governments, the Soviet Union was among the victors. Stalin had no intention of renouncing his own version of totalitarianism and his ambitions to conquer the world for Communism. Half of central and eastern Europe had remained under his control. Very soon, the Cold War began, which would keep the world on tenterhooks for more than forty years, under the threat of a conflict infinitely worse than all those preceding it given the risk of an atomic confrontation that would end civilization and perhaps even all life on the planet. The collapse of the Soviet Union from rotting within and the transformation of China into a capitalist country (yet still vertical and authoritarian) in the late 1980s brought a renewed sense of enthusiasm among all freedom lovers. Marxist-­based Communism, the most tenacious menace to the culture of freedom, along with Fascism, was falling apart due to 21

its economic and social failure, its injustices, and crimes. Once again, democracy would take global center stage as the only model capable of guaranteeing coexistence within diverse societies and of producing development, wealth, and opportunities for everyone within a system of respect for human rights, the law, and liberty. The political essayist Francis Fukuyama embodied this spirit in his The End of History and the Last Man (1992). There he claims that we had finally arrived at the “end of history,” in other words, to an era in which, having overcome the major disagreements between countries and ideologies, consensus would gradually be built in favor of democracy. Extremist fanatics of the Left or the Right, now reduced to minorities incapable of having an influence comparable to what Communism and Fascism had achieved in the past, would not perturb this process. It was overoptimism yet again. At practically the same time that this appealing but unreal prophecy was causing an international polemic, in the Middle and Far East, a new violent, implacable threat to the culture of freedom was emerging, embodied by the Islamic fundamentalism that would take its message of hate and destruction of freedom to the very heart of the United States and to London, Madrid, and other European cities, filling their streets with thousands of dead innocents and ushering in a period of international terrorism that took the entire West by surprise. The attacks later spread to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, leaving masses of dead bodies in places such as Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Casablanca, Sharm el Sheikh, Dahab, Kampala, Bali, and Islamabad as well as in practically all cities of Iraq and Afghanistan. Soon the free world would discover that the tentacles of Al Qaeda and related splinter groups had infiltrated their own communities and had the complicity of immigrant families, sometimes of the second and even third generations. The monsters had not disappeared. They were alive and well. They no longer had large armies like the totalitarian regimes of former years. Neither did they need them given that their strategy of persecution and demolition of democracy had an innovative weapon that was extremely difficult to combat: the suicide terrorist. 22  mario vargas llosa

Of course, the suicide terrorist has existed since the dawn of time; however, even in Japan, where many died in World War II to kill on behalf of the emperor, they were usually exceptional cases, incapable by themselves of changing the course of a war. But the modern suicide terrorist, like the ones we have seen operate, for example, in Iraq after the invasion of the Allied forces that overthrew Saddam Hussein, and that we are now seeing in Pakistan, Afghanistan and some African countries, is without precedent: a crucial tool in the strategy designed by Osama bin Laden and his allies. Suicide terrorism does not consist of inflicting a military defeat against the Great Satan, but rather of undermining him through attacks on innocent victims and local citizens that sow a sense of insecurity and panic, interrupt the functioning of institutions and lead governments—­ disconcerted by this cunning warfare, which consists of sudden hits on unexpected targets—­to take security measures that are sometimes flagrantly opposed to the most cherished of democratic principles and to violate human rights, one of the greatest victories of the culture of freedom. What has occurred in Guantánamo or in the Iraqi prisons with prisoners suspected of collaborating with terror is an ominous example of how bin Laden’s strategy has produced effective results. The suicide terrorist is a weapon that is extremely difficult to combat in an open society, where laws, individual guarantees, and human rights are respected, and where criticisms, doctrines, and ideas are freely expressed. He can go unnoticed, infiltrate, and blend in with the locals, prepare his attacks with minimal infrastructure, and easily choose his target. The capacity for destruction by this type of individual is immense because most human beings are unwilling to make this supreme sacrifice and, therefore, he has relatively easy access to the locations where he will commit his immolation, places that at any rate could never be fully protected. No government has the capacity to surround with tight security all public places of a country or a city. Moreover, thanks to the spectacular development of war technology, which today has enabled small, convenient devices to cause more damage than an entire artillery unit in the past, the suicide terrorist has an increasingly easy task. Given that the technology the return of the monsters  23

of destruction continues its incessant advance, it is no longer impossible to imagine in this foolish race of the human species toward death that we will eventually see portable atomic weapons. The suicide terrorist’s target is rarely a military objective, which tends to be protected by detection systems that make planning much more difficult. His targets are civilian, preferably places where a large number of people are gathered, such as buildings, metro stations, passenger jets, markets, and sports centers. The suicide terrorist does not attempt to win a battle or to weaken a military apparatus but to terrorize civilians and to sow confusion and chaos so that, pressured by an insecure, angry public opinion, which demands governments to act with a firm hand, governments will make security a top priority of their responsibilities and sacrifice others. Currently, for public institutions and private companies, this has meant a dizzying increase in spending on and of personnel for systems to detect weapons and metals, alarms, personal searches, installation of barriers, customs, and records, in airports, stations, libraries, stadiums, amusement parks, and so on, hindering transportation and greatly disrupting the daily lives of much of the population. However, the most serious consequence of the threat that suicide terrorists pose today for the democratic, liberal West is undoubtedly that, in its efforts to defend itself against the repeated attacks such as those of the Twin Towers in Manhattan (2001) or Atocha Station in Madrid (2004), it may gradually relinquish the most cherished conquests of the culture of freedom by reducing or abolishing the rights guaranteeing privacy, the principle that everyone is considered innocent until proven guilty, the prohibition of torture, the right to habeas corpus, banking secrecy, the right to criticize, and freedom of expression. Governments may confer on antiterrorism military and intelligence police forces a power that partially or totally escapes the control of representative government institutions such as parliament or the justice system. What an extraordinary victory for the Islamic fundamentalist leaders who launch their fanatics packed with explosives against the defenseless masses, to see how democracies stop being democratic with the argument that the only way to defend 24  mario vargas llosa

liberty is to infringe on it and to take steps that make them increasingly resemble authoritarian regimes! Terrorism not only plants bombs and kills innocent people. Through threats and blackmail, it also attempts (and sometimes succeeds) to intimidate Western authorities and the media into renouncing freedom of information and the right to criticize, and, at times, even the truth, in order to avoid becoming victims of reprisals. The case of the caricatures of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper and the subsequent mobilization of Islamic fundamentalism and its terrorist fringes against the illustrator who drew them and the director of the newspaper that published them, whose lives still hang in the balance and who have round-­ the-­clock security, is an instructive example of what I am talking about (as was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, 1988). When there was a call for leading newspapers of the Western world to reprint the caricatures to protest the terrorist threats following their publication, in solidarity with the threatened journalists, only a handful of news organizations dared to do so. Many, terrified, refrained. No one can deny that throughout the democratic, liberal West, within both public and private institutions, and particularly in the media, a covert self-­censoring of everything concerning Islam is widely practiced for fear of provoking the viciousness with which the organizations that have declared war to the death on free societies execute their revenge. Not only in the communications field is this undermining effect on freedom manifested in Western societies. This effect results from the actions of fanatics who, increasingly fearless given the concessions they are granted for their condemnation and warnings, demand the recognition of their practices and customs even when these essentially contradict the principles of individual freedom and equality, incompatible with all forms of discrimination. Militant sectors of immigrant communities in Europe associated with Islamic fundamentalism exert pressure so that, in the name of respect for religion and traditions, European cities accept, for example, schoolgirls wearing burkas and hijabs, symbols of discrimination and the subjugation of women in Muslim societies, or the establishment of separate the return of the monsters  25

pools and schools for men and women, or even the legal recognition of marriages arranged by parents. In some countries, this pressure has led to concessions that signify a blatant setback in some of the achievements of which the Western world can be most proud: individual rights, laicism, and gender equality. Clearly, immigration should not just be accepted but promoted; without it, no developed country of the West could continue to maintain its standard of living. It is also clear that immigration provides an extremely valuable service to European countries. The immigrant has the right to be respected, to receive all support necessary to facilitate his or her adaptation and to continue to practice his or her beliefs and customs, if these do not violate and are in keeping with democratic institutions, laws, and principles. It is ridiculous to assume that “respect for the culture” should mean that open societies must give up the best they have, that which has made them free, modern communities, by conceding to immigrants’ extraterritorial rights to continue to exercise in their midst practices opposing civilized conscience and constituting flagrant violations of human rights and the law. To permit this would mean a blatant step backward and a slow suicide for the culture of freedom. We should not attempt to clear our conscience by arguing that the enemies of freedom come only from the “other,” from other cultures and beliefs, and that freedom flourishes unfettered in our own. The scenario I described above has had the expected corollary of the reappearance in all Western societies of racist, xenophobic groups and an outbreak of nationalisms that we believed to be disappearing. These are our monsters and they are no less malignant or dangerous than the imported ones. For democracy to function, a variety of political parties and movements must exist that represent the full ideological range of society. Naturally, it is essential that, if not all, at least an indisputable majority of these political forces share basic democratic principles. In the years following the two world wars, revolutionary parties existed in free societies, of the Right and of the Left, which rejected the basic premises of democracy; however, they never had enough electoral support to take power, nor was there any risk 26  mario vargas llosa

it would fall into their hands. In Italy, for example, where the Communist Party became very powerful, these parties shared certain quotas of power yet never to the extent of threatening the system itself. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed impossible that anything similar would ever occur again. Nevertheless, the truth is that today, Europe is the scenario of an unsettling spectacle: the reemergence of an extremist, nationalistic, xenophobic, and racist Right, which does not believe in democratic principles, and which has made the rejection of the immigrant, and especially those from Muslim countries, its motto. This has been particularly well-­ received in the population sectors most affected by economic crises and precarious employment. These movements deliver to them the “Turk,” the “Moor” or “the Black,” as the scapegoat responsible for all the countries’ economic woes, for the rise in crime and, of course, accusing them of being potential or current agents and accomplices of terrorist groups. These political forces, which in the past were no more than mere sects or splinter groups, are no longer that today. They have grown, increasing their electoral stock, and in many countries now compete on an equal playing field with democratic parties. Still worse, to take away these groups’ voters, many parties of the left and center have let themselves become contaminated by these populist, antidemocratic ideologies. Racism is undoubtedly the most sinister aspect of this outbreak of extremism, due to the irrationality and supine ignorance with which it is championed and the potential violence implicit in all policies promoting it. Contrary to the notion that this racism targets immigrants of Muslim origin, another form of racism that has become a key ingredient in today’s European political life is antisemitism. As if the Holocaust of six million Jews perpetrated by Hitler was not enough to expose the criminal insanity of such an ideology! Yet it is here once again, in the political life of Europe, often covert, hidden behind campaigns of solidarity with the Palestinian people and of condemnation of Israeli policy. It is essential to make a clarification here. Israel is a country like any other and, as such, the policies it implements can and should be the subject of analysis, support, and criticism, like those of all governments. Many of the return of the monsters  27

us believe that the hardening of the Israeli government administrations following that of Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords, and the building of settlements in the occupied territories, are major obstacles to engaging in effective negotiation that would both guarantee peace for Israel and permit the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. This criticism has nothing to do with antisemitism, just as it is not anti-­ Arab to criticize the extremism and terrorist inclination of organizations such as Hamas or Hezbollah. I do not condemn possible criticisms of the initiatives and measures adopted by the Israeli government, and which I myself have made, but rather those which, adopting as a pretext the defense of the Palestinian people, take advantage to reintroduce in public debate, sheathed in a new legitimacy, the old bloodthirsty monster that led to pogroms, discriminatory laws, the yellow and black star of David sewn on suits and dresses, the concentration camps, and gas chambers. Unfortunately, antisemitism has a long tradition in Europe, for which reason the Europe of human rights and democracy has the moral and historic obligation to respond firmly to those offshoots of that monstrous debt weighing on its past. The Nazis committed the Holocaust, but this horror was gradually brewing over the centuries, in Russia, central Europe and France, and in the Balkans and the Carpathians, on the shores of the Mediterranean. There was practically no corner of the Old Continent where the prejudice against and harassment of Jewish communities did not leave a foul mark. Therefore, the democratic West must relentlessly denounce the resurgent antisemitism, which, like all racism, begins as no more than a manifestation of ignorance and stupidity but always ends with apocalyptic slaughter. Is there something that can be done to confront the monsters’ return? Of course there is. Mobilize against them. Do not let them advance and do not make concessions to those who now represent, no more or less than in the past, the negation of all that has been done to rise above barbarism, to make societies of the developed world thrive and become more humane. This was made possible through long struggles against obscurantism, fanaticism, prejudice, and ignorance, as well as through innumerable conflicts 28  mario vargas llosa

in which, gradually, and with the sacrifice of countless thinkers, writers, political leaders, union leaders, militant party members, and the common people, the culture of freedom began to take root in Europe and defeat its enemies. Thanks to that lengthy process, there exist open societies, human rights, political pluralism, freedom of the press, religious freedom, gender equality, laicism, and the rejection of all forms of racial, religious, or political discrimination. In none of these areas and for no reason should governments, organizations, or democratic citizens recant in the least or take a step backward because, if they do so, they will betray the very principles of the culture of freedom. This cannot be the sole responsibility of governments. It concerns all citizens equally. It is urgent to address all initiatives which, masked behind pious pretexts such as respect for all cultures or solidarity with the oppressed, attempt to establish enclaves, communities, or individuals that enjoy extraterritorial rights exempting them from obeying the law or rather authorizing them to break it, or to reintroduce in the political debate any form of racism and xenophobia, regardless of how it is disguised. Intellectuals, the media, scientists, opinion leaders, all those who have platforms to make themselves heard and for that very reason know better than anyone the indispensable nature of freedom and democracy to guarantee progress and to ensure that life is breathable, have the civic duty to act against the resurgent monsters and to firmly warn them: You will not prevail. I am not certain that this will occur, unfortunately. My pessimism stems from the fact that I observe around me—­I spend most of my time in Europe—­a growing complacency and skepticism, an apathy that distances a large number, particularly of young people, from their civic duty. A demoralized or cynical attitude toward politics prevails, which appears to be based on the conviction that there is nothing to be done, that the political class is too decayed to embark on major idealist actions, that it is too mediocre, corrupt, or bureaucratic to be able to change things, and that, for this reason, the only thing to do is to resign oneself and ride out the storm, each on his own terms and at his own risk, without wasting time on adventures that will lead only to frustration and failure. the return of the monsters  29

Jean-­François Revel (1924–­2006) wrote about this subject some years ago, in a book which today’s circumstances have again made current: How Democracies Perish. I do not want to end on a somber, fatalistic note because, frankly, it is not what I think. Although the political scenario of the liberal, democratic West worries me, I believe that, like in the past, all that is healthy, idealistic, and generous and that has to do with love for freedom in the Western world will eventually react and prevail over those who want to end it. Since I am a writer of fiction and not a political essayist, I will now tell you a story exactly as it happened. I am not changing the subject here, although it may at first seem so. A few years ago, in late December 2004, a tsunami hit the coast of Kenya, which devastated lives and homes, destroyed villages and forests, and caused major economic upheaval in that African country. One of the victims was a hippopotamus named Owen. He was just a few months old and weighed three hundred kilos. The raging waters had swept him along the length of the Sabaki River and hurled him into the Indian Ocean. There, the choppy waves and currents driven wild by the storm threw him back onto land, leaving him stranded, and no doubt terrified and exhausted, on the outskirts of Mombasa. Fortunately, some volunteers from the Lafarge Park Natural Reserve, which stood next to that Kenyan port, found him. They worked to calm him and help him regain his strength. But they could not bring back his mother, who predictably perished in the cataclysm. Hippopotamuses are very family oriented, and calves stay close to their parents during the first four years of life. Not one to miss an opportunity, Owen, the orphan, quickly found an adoptive mother to replace the one he had lost. Ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who manages Lafarge Park, was surprised to learn that, among all the females on the reserve, Owen had chosen for this maternal function a large one-­hundred-­year-­old turtle, which was already assuming her duties with affection and responsibility. Since then, mother and child have become inseparable. They swim, eat, and sleep together. Anytime anyone, man or beast, approaches the turtle, 30  mario vargas llosa

the normally peace-­loving Owen becomes enraged and launches a snort that scatters the birds from nearby trees. This tender story does not surprise me much. Many years ago, I was teaching at George Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Across from the apartment building where I lived was a lovely zoo where I would walk in the mornings. There I met a newborn hippopotamus—­pink, ugly, silly, and delightful—­with whom I got along very well. He must have guessed my longstanding weakness for hippopotamuses because I swear that he seemed glad to see me each day when I approached to say good morning. He played with his mother, splashing in the water as she opened her enormous trap to give him some noisy lickings of maternal love. Hippopotamuses are benign, defenseless, hedonistic, and dreamy creatures. Like hippies, they like to make love, not war. Their entanglement when mating is spectacular, I can assure you. To watch them joined in an amorous twist, the unaware would think they were trying to kill one other, but they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. It is thrilling to watch them roll in the mud with childish joy or to wait for hours, with infinite patience, for some hummingbird or butterfly to fly into their mouths and thus to add a touch of seasoning to their herbivore diet since their narrow throats permit them to swallow only very small fish and birds. I am also quite fond of turtles, both large and small, land and aquatic. Once I witnessed them, in the 1970s, spawning on a little beach along the Marañón River, on a moonlit night in the Amazon. It was a delicate and beautiful spectacle. I tried to give my youngest son a turtle once. Gonzalo was such an urban child that, when he held the little animal in his hands, he tried to rub it against the floor several times to make it go, like a windup car. The slow creature sometimes disappeared among the bougainvilleas and ferns of the garden for days at a time. It could go for hours without sticking out its bleary-­eyed little head from its shell. But when it did, attracted by a piece of lettuce or a cracker, it would chew with infinite calm as its eyes shone with an enviable light of appreciation, wisdom, and contentment with life. The poor thing came to a tragic end. We went on a trip and when we returned a week later, we found it dead, feet the return of the monsters  31

up. We never tried to find out which of the children in the house had put it in that position, without suspecting that it could not right itself alone. The story of Owen and his adoptive mother has a moral, of course. Is it not a disgrace that two animals belonging to species as distinct as turtles and hippopotamuses could coexist, relate to one another, and share affection for one another, whereas stupid human bipeds savagely kill each other as soon as they discover frequently insignificant differences between them? If one looks back at the wars, genocides, and bloodiest killings of recent years, one will discover that the homicidal passions behind the worst collective tragedies occur among very close communities, blood brothers, whose rivalries stem from distinctions of religious doctrine, political ideology, or ethnic customs that are esoteric for those who do not live within their midst. A particularly heinous example has been and continues to be that of Iraq. For every foreign soldier who has fallen victim to terror, one hundred to two hundred Iraqis are assassinated by their own countrymen. Shiite extremists kill Sunnis and Sunni extremists kill Shiites and, within the two largest Muslim communities of the country, the members of the different Shiite and Sunni sects kill one another whereas Muslims of both tendencies kill Kurds and Christians and the Kurds kill Shiites and Sunnis and so on and so forth until that dizzying heap of cadavers is produced. And what can one say about the bloodbaths in the heart of Western Europe? The disintegration of Yugoslavia took place amid horrid collective slaughter in which Serbs killed Bosnians and Croats while the latter turned against Serbs and Bosnians. Bosnians did not liquidate as many people, not because of a lack of desire but rather of means and because there were fewer of them. Terrorism between the Serbs and Kosovars—­who had previously coexisted in the same territory for hundreds of years—­was no less bloody. In terms of the total population of the countries involved, the percentage of deaths in the Yugoslav Wars exceeded that of World War II. And in 1994, in Rwanda, let us recall, the Hutu government used machetes and fire to kill some eight hundred thousand Tutsis. The list would be extremely long if we were to add to these two examples the carnage of 32  mario vargas llosa

East Timor, Burundi, Biafra, Eritrea, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Peru, Colombia, Chechnya and, these days, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The idea that human beings are superior to animals because they have reason and, according to believers, souls, is a vain, unjust parti pris if we consider the behavior of these different species in relation to their neighbors. In general, animals kill only to obtain sustenance and to ensure survival. Rarely do they attack family members or individuals of the same species or for the pure pleasure of killing. Human beings kill most of the time—­judging from the impartial light of reason—­for mere appetites, fanaticisms, intolerance, greed, perversions, and selfishness. Those who unleash wars and slaughters often suffer as much as their victims in those violent clashes. Prodigious scientific and technological advances have permitted notable progress in the areas of health, education, and knowledge of the natural world. But they have also equipped humanity with such an excessive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction only a portion of which would be more than enough to destroy the planet. Development and progress—­without a doubt notable—­have brought us increasingly close to the abyss of violence and decay of which we are already quite aware. Yet no government of any stripe appears to be willing to take decisive action to confront this threat. We belligerent human beings should imitate the hippopotamus and the turtle who acts as his mother, there in Kenya. For several years now, they have been an example of wisdom, coexistence, solidarity, and love. Note

Lecture upon receiving the Doctorate in Letters Honoris Causa, by the City College of New York, November 18, 2010. Translated from the Spanish by Kristin Keenan de Cueto.

the return of the monsters  33

6. Mario Vargas Llosa visits his Cátedra in October 2015 and converses with Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto. Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

chapter 3

From Miguel de Cervantes to César Moro Mario Vargas Llosa and Alonso Cueto

Alonso Cueto (AC): Good evening. Before we begin, I would like to thank

all the students, administrators, professors, and friends of City College for the stimulating and enjoyable days that you have allowed me to spend with you. I would like to start by commenting, with regard to the four hundredth anniversary of Don Quixote, on how important this great novel has been to us—­writers as well as readers. In many ways, the Quixote is a precursor of the Latin American novel. Its celebrated protagonist, Don Quixote of La Mancha, anticipates with his quest, his illusions, and his confrontation between reality and play many of the great themes—­among them, travel literature and the police novel—­ that have emerged in Latin America. Just as in Spain’s early modern period, the Latin America of the twentieth century is living through a period of disenchantment: that of its own illusions and dreams, and of the destruction of utopias. This period, with writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, is very similar to that of Cervantes. This novel is so timely; it is a novel, in the first place, in which there appear characters of so many different origins, of so many different traditions, characters of all kinds of ethnicities, characters from all sites in Spain. On the one hand, Cervantes—­and Don Quixote—­meet up during their journeys with people from worlds that are so different; on the other, the play between the illusion that transforms into reality, and the reality that is seen enduringly as illusion throughout the book, is one of the great 35

themes of the Latin American novel ever since Juan Rulfo and Jorge Luis Borges established their bases for the demarcation between the world of dream and the world of reality. There are a series of correlations between Mario’s and Cervantes’s works, a series of convergences. I wanted, Mario, to bring up two of the notes you wrote in El pez en el agua [1993; A Fish in the Water, 1994]. In one, you comment on the day that you met Raúl Porras Barrenechea, the great Peruvian historian. He welcomed you into a room filled with small statues of Don Quixote and Sancho. In another episode of El pez en el agua, you mention that on those bohemian nights when reporters from the newspaper Última Hora went barhopping in Lima with a reporter named Norwin Sánchez, he would recite from Don Quixote in a loud voice, to the customers’ stupefaction. After he recited from the novel, he would exclaim, “What great prose, coño!” I imagine these were some of your first associations with the novel. Tell us how your love affair with the Quixote began; you’ve written a great essay about it, “Una novela para el siglo XXI” [A novel for the twenty-­first century]. Share with us how your relationship as a reader of Cervantes’s novel began. Mario Vargas Llosa (MVL) : Yes, of course, with pleasure, but before I

do, let me also thank City College for its generous invitation, which is the continuation of a sequence, as Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez has reminded us, since in reality, this is one of several visits I have made to this welcoming, warm university, where, fortunately, our language’s literature, and especially, Latin American literature, has what I would call a place of honor. And now, to the Quixote. What happened to me with the Quixote is, I believe, the same that has happened to many young people who attempt to read it for the first time. I tried to read it when I was still in high school; we had a professor of literature in my senior year of high school who was very good and strongly encouraged the students to read the books he would discuss. But my attempt to read the Quixote at fifteen years of age was a complete failure. I didn’t 36  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

understand the words, and its long sentences distracted me. So, I simply stopped reading the book shortly after having started. I only read the Quixote when I was already a university student, and thanks to Azorín [ José Martínez Ruiz]. I had been an enthusiastic reader of his from a very early age; and one book that I read with the greatest enthusiasm was La ruta de don Quijote [Don Quixote’s Route], a collection of essays that he wrote for a Madrid newspaper after he had taken a trip through La Mancha—­to all those places that appear in the novel and were also linked to Cervantes’s life. It is an absolutely precious little book; a reporter’s journal written in a very simple style, but with Azorín’s extraordinary prose: precise, transparent, meticulous, elegant. The book excited me so much that it pushed me to again try to read the Quixote, and this time, yes, I made it, with Azorín taking me by the hand. I remember how dazzled I was by the story, and I believe one of the first things that needs to be said about the Quixote is that it is an immensely entertaining book. It’s a book that hooks the reader from the first and then impels him forward on this unending, multifaceted adventure; it’s like taking a trip at once through La Mancha and through Spain, because some episodes, the newest and most interesting of all, take place outside La Mancha, in Barcelona, for instance. Before speaking about our great classic, the symbol of our language and culture, it should be said that it’s a vastly entertaining and absolutely timely novel. It is a novel that, among its many achievements, manages to transform the definition of the human condition into a perfectly comprehensible symbol for all minds and readers. Just like Don Quixote, we have all felt the need, on some occasion, to change reality so that it becomes more like our dreams. As a function of this, of acting upon reality, reality has continued to be modified and transformed over the span of history and has taken us from our caves all the way to the stars in this modern period. Humanity’s extraordinary transformation has been possible because humans have always had a kind of Don Quixote hidden inside who made them see reality through the eyes of fantasy, of the imagination. In the case of Don Quixote, his is an imagination forged from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  37

by chivalric novels, but for the human imagination, the sources could be very diverse. The result is the same: reality as we know it is not enough, we want to transcend it; we seek something more than the reality we can live in. This disobedient act before the world as it is, this will to transform it into something that resembles our appetites, our desire, our dreams, has been the great motor of change and of progress. This is the symbol that, in some way, Don Quixote miraculously incarnates. We do not know if Cervantes was aware of the extraordinary strength and vigor that the symbol would come to have in the protagonist he created, but it is what, in fact, has given Cervantes’s novel the ability to withstand the centuries and languages, and be transformed into one of the greatest of literary creations. We must compel the young, the children of our times, to read the novel in which, besides experiencing funny, intense, and dramatic adventures with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, we discover precisely that extraordinary force of the imagination to change the world we live in. AC : One of the protagonist’s most interesting characteristics is his

multiplicity, that is, his diversity. The eighteenth century categorized Don Quixote as a madman, stating that Cervantes wanted to show us how mistaken a person can be when lacking a connection to reality. Romanticism, in contrast, affirmed that Don Quixote was a noble and pure soul, a hero, a good man. The Romantics believed that Cervantes gave us an exemplar of what a man at the service of an ideal of justice should be. What I find interesting, and what I think many of us readers have discovered by now, is that both versions are true. That is to say, on the one hand, Don Quixote is deranged and a madman, but on the other, he is also a good man, a dreamer. What most stirred me, however, is that Cervantes did not create a prototype, he did not create an entirely naïve man. And this seemed to me especially moving when I read the novel. In one of the episodes, Don Quixote fashions a helmet, a kind of headgear. To try it out, he hits it, splitting and breaking it. He then has to make another, but he no longer hits the new helmet, in case it might

38  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

break. From the beginning, therefore, he harbors the germ of a doubt; there is this idea that perhaps his delusion is not all that assured. This seems strange to me, because, throughout the episodes, and especially at the end, the novel goes on to demonstrate that Don Quixote has some sense of reality. In fact, at the end, he again becomes a character who clings totally to real life. One of the lessons that Cervantes teaches us is the importance of a point of view, that is, that each person sees reality differently, from different angles, and therefore, all have their own particular version. There is a multiplicity of points of view. You share this multiplicity of characters in your novels. MVL : Of course, a character’s depth is always revealed by the nuances of

his behavior, of his personality. But before developing this idea, I’d like to recall that when Don Quixote recovers his sanity, someone takes over his delusion, and that someone is Sancho Panza, no less. This is, to me, a tremendously moving scene in the novel. When this man, who seems so completely carnal, so completely dominated by reality, sees his master at the end regain his sanity and start to tread on real ground, he takes off toward fantasy and incites his master to get up so both can return to the roads in search of that illusion that has caused Don Quixote’s crown to crack open so many times. It is an absolutely marvelous moment when we see Sancho Panza transformed from a realist into an idealist—­and into a dreamer. As to the many diverse points of view, yes, this is the great originality of the Quixote. The novel, until then, had been a novel of non-­evolving figures. The chivalric romances are novels in which human beings follow a particular behavior: some are good, some are evil, some, intelligent, and some comic. However, a character from a chivalric romance rarely evolved. This is the great originality of the Quixote. It contains a psychological subtlety that is also deeply moral; human beings can be transformed, they can change, they can differ according to the perspective from which they are judged or seen—­and this is Don Quixote’s case. From one perspective, he is a poor madman. A

from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  39

man who does not understand reality as it is, because he obscures it with his delusion, his profoundly distorted idea of reality. From another perspective, he is an idealist; he wants his dream to become reality, and he struggles, although he is going against the flow, to make reality resemble and bend to the idea that he has of it. That is the source of progress, of the great motor of progress, for we have always had “quijotes” in history who never accepted reality as it was; they wanted reality to be different, and the effort they invested in this belief has transformed reality and has signified the great progress that humanity has experienced, from its origins to our times. It is also one of the marvelous transformations the novel offers us. It tells a story, but at the end there is somehow expressed in the story: the human condition, the best of the human condition. AC : I believe you’ve touched on a theme that is crucial to your way of

telling, of narrating. It’s a theme I share with you, the idea that the story—­that is to say, the plot’s carefulness, the structuring of time, the narrator’s control—­will generate an expectation, that it will generate what you have mentioned before, an entertainment—­entertainment is not a bad word. A friend once told me that boredom is given too much prestige in twentieth-­century novels. And one time you said that nothing is as difficult to tell as a well-­told story. That is, to tell a story well requires large doses of intrigues, characters making appearances, and time management. This is a crucial matter in your work, welcomed by your many readers, and is also present in the Quixote. MVL : If the novel doesn’t tell a story that hooks the reader, that is, that

removes him from his own reality and transforms him into one more character in the story, then it has failed. A novel is fundamentally a story well told. However, it’s difficult to define what is a well-­told story, for a story can be told in many different ways. But there’s always one that is better than all the others and captivates the reader more—­captivating him in the most literal sense, taking him from where he happens to be and inserting him within the world of fiction, as if he were a participant. 40  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

I believe that this is most difficult to achieve, and it’s the dream of all novelists. Of course, some novelists are interested in exploring language, exploring technique, or exploring structure. But if even with all those elements, they are incapable of telling a story that hooks the reader from beginning to end, the novel has failed. It can be very interesting from a linguistic perspective, or from a formal perspective, but the novel qua novel is, fundamentally, a story well told. A story well told is one in which everything that takes place somehow contributes to the enrichment of the story’s totality. One doesn’t have to be a literary critic to realize straightaway that a novel lacks something or includes too much. When a reader immediately becomes conscious of reading, it is because what he’s reading is either lacking or has too much. An accomplished novel is one that does not give the reader a chance to pull away from it and adopt a critical perspective. Only when it ends does an accomplished novel grant us this freedom and allow us to distance ourselves and judge what we’ve read and our own emotions while reading it. This can be achieved in many different ways. Don Quixote achieved it one way, the great writers of the nineteenth century, such as Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the giants of the nineteenth-­ century novel, by utilizing very different techniques. But the same occurred in the twentieth century: writers such as Faulkner, Malraux, and Joyce wrote works that similarly take our breath away. Their works do not allow us to distance ourselves from what we’re reading until the end, when we leave that artificially constructed world of words and imagination, to judge it from our own. Great novels not only grant us marvelous experiences that we would never have without reading them, but they also transform us internally. They awaken desires and points of view about reality that were previously unknown to us. Perhaps their most important contribution—­social, historical, and moral—­is that they develop in us a critical attitude toward the world. For when we awaken from the spell and enchantment of a novel by Tolstoy or Dickens, the world that surrounds us seems much poorer, a world far beneath those worlds of which we are capable, or that great creators from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  41

are capable of inventing. This affects our behavior as citizens, that is, it affects the civic attitude of readers of literature. AC : There are some cases, for example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852], that

signified so much for its time, and there are many more. To transform the world and change one’s life are experiences that have to do with one’s conscience. In fact, it happened to me. I read La ciudad y los perros [1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966] when very young and from that day, when I pass by La Punta, when I see the school and the sea, it is all different to me after having read the book. Everything seems changed. I have friends who ask me to take them to Tacna Avenue to see from what point Zavalita looks at the avenue at the beginning of Conversación en La Catedral [1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975]. I clearly remember that when I went to Buenos Aires, the first thing I did was go to Constitution Plaza to see where Borges’s “El Aleph” began; for me, the real-­life experience was so much more disappointing than that in the book. Obviously, one does not remain unscathed after reading a great novel, a great narrative. The most common phrase I remember is from a friend. He told me that after reading a description of Chekhov’s dog, from then on, all dogs seem Chekhovian to him; that is, all are alike when next to each other. But returning to Don Quixote, you are also a great reader, a great scholar: one of your greatest essays is La orgía perpetua [1975; The Perpetual Orgy, 1986], about Madame Bovary, a novel very akin to Don Quijote. The protagonist, Madame Bovary, also indulges in the vice of reading; she believes that she can live in the reality given to her by her reading—­and in this novel, the theme of perspectivism is a function. I particularly remember the book’s ending, an extraordinary ending, in my judgment, when Charles Bovary meets Emma’s lover, and he feels nervous. Charles Bovary sees this man and thinks that he would have liked to be that man whom his wife had loved. But he voices a phrase, perhaps the only great phrase he ever said in his life, “It is a thing of fate.” MLV : “It is the fault of fate.” “C’est la faute de la fatalité.” 42  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

AC : The other man looks at him and what Bovary has said seems rather

vile to him. This is where perspectivism comes in, also the difference from one opinion to another. Your characters, as reader and writer, are transgressors, rebels, dreamers. Is there a pattern? MVL: Without a doubt, I believe Flaubert’s influence has been enormous in

my case. Of course, I acknowledge it. It’s true, Madame Bovary, like Don Quixote, believes that reality is like the ink from books, not chivalric romances, in her case, but popular love novels. She tries to live like the heroines of those novels, and in the same way as Don Quixote when he attacks the windmills believing they are giants, Madame Bovary also breaks her crown for believing that real beings act like those in novels, and that is what leads her to that tragic conceit, to suicide. I read Madame Bovary truly dazzled by it. Flaubert helped me enormously to discover, first, which kind of author I didn’t want to be, but also which kind I did want to be. This had not been clear to me before reading Flaubert and, above all, before reading Madame Bovary. I wanted to be a realist writer, not because I rejected the world of fantasy, of the imagination, as I was a good reader of writers like Rulfo and Borges. But this kind of literature—­the fantastic—­wasn’t what I wanted to write. My nature impelled me instead to invent a reality that seemed like lived reality, not a reality from fantasy or from the imagination. At the same time, I felt a great need to reject the realist literature that precisely because it wanted to photograph reality, lacked its own life and was like a photograph of what existed, but was, let’s say, missing that added world that great literature always reveals to us in its stories. When reading Madame Bovary, I discovered all of a sudden the type of realism that on one hand, pretended to describe reality, yet on the other, greatly enriched it thanks to the perfection of its prose, the efficacy of the technique, and the construction of the story’s structure. It was truly a revelation. There could exist a realism that in no way conflicted with artistic passion, with the desire to achieve an aesthetic aim within the story, and at the same time, follow Flaubert’s idea that for a story from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  43

to seem to live on its own, the narrator had to disappear. Thus, the narrator had to become an absence that dissolved into the novel’s own characters, so the reader, due to the absence, did not feel that someone was pulling the characters’ strings in the story, but that they acted like free agents, like truly autonomous beings, not subordinated to a superior intelligence. For this reason, Flaubert invented a way of writing and a way of describing in which the author or the narrator seemed to be absent. The narrator, Flaubert would say, must be like God, be in all places, but not be visible in any of them. The narrator must be an absence that disappears behind the narrative, one who hides behind his own characters, in such a way that the reader never has the sensation that one of those characters is being manipulated by someone with power over them. The character must seem to live on his or her own, and this is achieved through the impersonality of the narration. I read Madame Bovary, I read all of Flaubert’s other works, with true awe, and I have always said that for any young person with a literary vocation who wishes to learn how to write, no manual comes close to Flaubert’s correspondence, especially the correspondence during the five years when he was writing Madame Bovary. Thanks to his singular relationship with his lover, Louise Colet—­they saw each other only one weekend a month—­they constantly wrote one another. Flaubert, who worked slavishly, every day, hour after hour, at times spending hours correcting one phrase, when he wrote his love letters to Louise Colet at night, the only topic he wished to talk about was what he had done during the day. Thanks to this, therefore, we have a unique kind of document. We may see how a master work is written day by day. We can follow daily all the problems he encountered—­the discouragement that at times overwhelmed him, other times his enthusiasm, his exhilaration when he believed he had polished a phrase. The search for the exact term, the mot juste. It is then marvelous to see in Flaubert’s case how, thanks to his perseverance, his tenacity, his extraordinary will to succeed, he manages to create his own genius. He manages to write a master work without having been born a genius. After having written some 44  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

very mediocre little works, works that more often than not reflected his reading, reflected the literary models of the time, he finally writes a master work in which his own personality distinguishes itself and is distanced from all other models. For a beginning writer, it is most stimulating to follow the construction of Madame Bovary. It was, of course, for me, and for this reason, my debt to Flaubert is enormous. AC : The saying that writing is an act of hypnosis has always intrigued me.

A writer must try to hypnotize a reader. To achieve it, he must create music, he must create a particular tone for his writing. It is, therefore, essential to create this music. In Flaubert’s case, as you have rightly said, he would go out in the afternoon to pronounce his sentences to see how they sounded; the theme is that literature occurs in time, in the time of the reader, in mental time, but it resembles music; indeed, literature and music share many terms, such as phrase, tone. The same can be said of Cervantes, because there is extraordinary music throughout Cervantes’s book; no doubt one could say the same of William Faulkner, who is a great, an extraordinary artist, let’s say, of composition. In Faulkner’s case, with an extremely important particularity: to recollect the music of the unconscious, the music of the occult, of the intimate, of the secretive, of the most profound within each one. This was also a very important contribution. A writer, who from 1928 to 1932 writes at least three major works: The Sound and the Fury [1929], Sanctuary [1931], and Light in August [1932]. These are also important novels to you. MVL : Yes, I discovered Faulkner when I was at the university, my freshman

year, in 1953. I remember the awe he inspired in me, and I also remember that he was the first writer that I read with paper and pencil in hand, as I tried to disassemble somewhat the complexity with which he organized time. Time in Faulkner is something so slippery, so unpredictable, it goes by. Time is like space in Faulkner. One can go back, jump, advance, return, go forward. None of this is arbitrary; these movements in the time of the story are creating suspense; they are exciting a curiosity in order to lift the darkness that the reader is often in at the beginning, from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  45

because he knows that important things are happening, but he is not exactly sure which and, above all, he does not know their antecedents and their consequences. This manner of obscuring the story to make it more profound, more complex, more subtle, and to maintain the reader’s curiosity, is Faulkner’s great technique. There is where many writers, mostly of my generation, learned the technique of the novel. I don’t speak only of Latin America—­this went also for Europe. Faulkner really creates a world that, in the first place, is a world of enormous force, a great richness of human types, of surprising, unusual actions. He also creates an entire verbal toolbox, a structural type, with which to tell these stories in a most persuasive and efficacious manner. Faulkner is, I believe, an extraordinary case; he is probably the greatest modern writer after the great classics, comparable to the great classics of the nineteenth century. I have experienced this each time I reread him. I have never been disappointed; on the contrary, with each rereading, I have discovered more subtleties, more complexity in his stories. I remember, when I visited Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, now a museum, that I was very impressed to see in his library a copy of Las palmeras salvajes [1940], the translation by Borges of his The Wild Palms. I picked up the book and discovered that Faulkner never knew that Borges, a writer almost as great as he was, had translated it into Spanish, because the book had not been opened, its pages were uncut. Questions from the audience

Ángel L. Estévez : I would like to thank Mario, in particular, for such a

wonderful talk this afternoon. My question, or rather, both a comment and a question: when a writer decides to recreate a historical event, that text enters into competition with the official history, or with the known historical occurrence. In the case of La fiesta del Chivo [2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001], does this novel intend to compete with the official historical event? Is the historical novel per se a questioning of the official historical event? Thank you. 46  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

MVL : In contrast to the historian, the novelist is not obliged to respect

historical truth. He can transgress it; he can violate it. When reading a novel, one knows that it is fundamentally a creation, that it is not a reproduction of a reality that antecedes the novel. There are novelists, above all in the nineteenth century, who would call this an “objective reconstruction.” If it is an absolutely objective reconstruction, it is a bad novel. Very clearly, that novel will lack imagination, lack any added element. What makes a novel great is not only that it presents a convincing view of reality, but that this reality has something added—­ precisely the created part, added by the novelist to the real. That which is properly literary in a story is what did not exist before the novel existed. Therefore, when I have written novels based on historical events or historical characters, such as La fiesta del Chivo, a novel whose protagonist is Generalísimo Trujillo and the dictatorship he personified, I have utilized everything that I found to be novelesque and that proved useful for the novel. I discarded many things because, although they may have existed in reality, they would have seemed implausible when transformed into literature. I have also added many things from my own imagination, from my own fantasy, that I thought helped to round out the story and made the protagonist and the situations more visible—­ many of them terrible, bloody, horrifying—­that represented Trujillo’s tyranny. When one takes liberties with history, one runs a risk, and the risk is that the reader who knows the history will disbelieve the story one tells in the novel; if a reader disbelieves, the novel dies. It is very important for an author, when writing a novel, to constantly gauge up to which point he can transgress history without provoking that kind of critical awareness in the reader. That critical awareness kills the novel. Therefore, I have added and invented things, but always making sure that they remain well within the regime and the character’s own nature. This was not easy, because the most extraordinary thing that has happened to me many times with readers who speak to me about La fiesta del Chivo is that they say, well, but it couldn’t have been like that; it isn’t true, it couldn’t have been so terrible. They are very from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  47

surprised when I tell them, no, it was worse! There were many things much more terrible than what I narrated and that I’ve not been able to tell because they’re not plausible. If a reader read them, his sensitivity and personal decency would make him reject them as unreal. It’s a defense mechanism we readers have; we do not want any human being to degenerate to such extremes of cruelty, so horrifying, as in the case of Trujillo. Writing the novel was, for me, like submerging myself in levels of horror that are rare in history. In Latin America, we have had myriad dictators, truly bloodthirsty monsters, but I believe that few cases went to such extremes as Trujillo in his cold-­heartedness, his cruelty, and his histrionics. What was most terrifying was to substantiate, not only in Trujillo’s case, but in those of so many dictators, how popular this character became; that there were so many people who believed that he had somehow brought about modernity, order, progress. Well, unfortunately, one can say the same of many dictators. Not only were they horrific, ferocious, and unscrupulous, but they were also popular. I always say that if the average persons in the Dominican Republic had seized Trujillo’s henchmen, they would probably have lynched them in the streets. Afterward, with distance, a very critical, fierce attitude emerges. But what occurred during those years, similar to what occurred during Stalin’s years [in Russia] and Mao’s [in China], an entire society is subjugated all of a sudden, directly assuming the role imposed by the dictator. This was one of the characteristics that was most difficult for me to show in the novel when I was writing La fiesta del Chivo. James Reed : My question has to do with a theme in the novel Historia de

Mayta [1984; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986]. This book deals with a man during the years of terrorism in Peru, during the sixties, seventies. I ask Mario, in this book, where is the line of demarcation between the following: Trotsky and the leftist groups, in which Mayta played a particular role, and your own creative ideas? MVL : To write that novel, and really to write all the novels I’ve written, I

have always made sure to document myself, not in order to write one 48  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

that is loyal to history, but to lie in an informed manner. In order to invent more freely, I always want to know the basic materials with which I’m working. I wrote that novel because I became familiar—­through a person who had been in contact with the individual who later became the model for the protagonist—­with the story of an old Trotskyite who spent his life in clandestine meetings without ever having lived what he preached and to which he had dedicated his life, which was the revolution, revolutionary action. At a certain time, he meets a second lieutenant, that is, a very young military officer, who begins to talk about the revolution in a manner that clearly makes this old revolutionary laugh, as something completely unreal. Still, he decides to try to indoctrinate the youth, who’s full of enthusiasm, but who knows nothing about revolution, and persuade him to follow his cause. Just the opposite happens. The youth instead seduces the old revolutionary, telling him that it is possible to organize a revolution, even though the initial group is small. This really happened, not like I tell it, but it did happen. An old Trotskyite seduces a second lieutenant, attempts to indoctrinate him, yet at the end, it’s the second lieutenant who convinces the revolutionary that they should move to action—­although action here refers only to the two of them and a small, ridiculous group that, of course, is defeated shortly after rebelling. I wanted to tell the story of this old revolutionary—­I kept following it, trying to find out, yet no one knew what had happened to him—­so I invented many things. And when I had almost finished the novel, all at once, I found his trail. I learned that the model of Alejandro Mayta was in jail, serving a ten-­year sentence. I ran to the jail to see him, but he had been released two or three days before. The jail’s director told me that he had a partner and a small business where they sold coffee and fruit inside the jail. And he told me, go speak with his friend. I spoke with the friend and convinced him to tell me where he was; he had gotten a job at an ice cream shop. I then went to see him, and I still remember the look of bewilderment on his face, when I told him, look, I’ve spent the last two years thinking about you, and following all the traces you’ve left, your steps through from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  49

life, and finally, I find you. I explained that I was writing a novel based on what had been his adventure. He said: Well, I will give you one night, we’ll speak for one night, but afterward, never more, we’ll never see each other or ever speak again about this. I said, well, I’m delighted! I took him to my house and, indeed, we talked all night. That was when I discovered that I knew much more than he about this episode. Because he had been caught and incarcerated, he didn’t know many details and found out about them through our conversation. Besides, I discovered another important thing, that this was a very small episode in his life. That so many more important things had happened in his life, and they were fresher in his mind. He had forgotten this little episode from the land of Jauja—­he was, besides, a sick man; he would get up constantly to urinate; at times, he became quite agitated. The only thing he was proud of—­this impressed me very much—­was that the business he had started with his jail friends was respected by everyone, by all the prisoners, from the fiercest to the most peaceful. So much so that he served them occasionally as a bank; they gave him and his partner money to keep for them. He was very proud of that; it was the most important detail of his life, and that was what he really remembered. Well, he made me change the novel’s ending. That ending was a conversation with the model, and we learn that the novel’s author knows much more than the character who impelled him to invent the story. I never knew what he thought of the novel when he left, as I never saw him again—­neither do I know whether he is alive or dead, if he read the novel or if he did not. It was a very interesting story in which the fictional character materialized and appeared all at once, as if to give me the story’s ending. Isabel Estrada : I have been reading in the news how sad you are over

Carmen Balcells’s death, and I wanted to ask you how you think this will change the literary scene. MVL: Well, Carmen Balcells [1930–­2015] was a character about whom I believe

many books will be written, because she had an extremely important role in the editorial life of our language, of the Spanish language. She 50  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

changed the relationship between authors and editors. When Carmen first began as a literary agent, the editors in general thought that they did a great favor to authors by publishing them, above all if they were Spanish-­language authors. They would make them sign leonine contracts, where the authors lost their copyright forever, and received insignificant commissions, ridiculously low for the sales of their books. Balcells began to change all this. She demanded that the editors agree to sign contracts with fixed deadlines; she made the editors compete among themselves for manuscripts; she increasingly incited the editors to abandon their provincialism and think of the Spanish language as a great market. It was truly fundamental that the editors in Spain turned to Latin America, opening markets in Latin America and integrating, from an editorial perspective, what had been until then an archipelago, very isolated, entirely uncommunicated. In a certain way, thanks to Carmen Balcells, the literary world of our language became one world, not separate islands closed off from each other. For the authors, this made it possible that many could live from the sales of their books and that they finally began to receive royalties for their books, something that before hardly ever happened. She was a great promoter of Latin American authors in Spain, a great promoter, and, I believe, many Latin American authors owe her a debt of gratitude for making us known in Spain thanks to her enormous efforts. She was not someone with a literary background, but she had a marvelous reader’s instinct and knew which book would turn on a particular audience, and she demanded that editors publish a certain number of copies. She played a very, very important role in what is the book market, in editorial politics; as I said, perhaps Carmen Balcells’s major achievement was, in great part, to have contributed to the integration of the worlds represented by Spanish, our shared language. Diego Chiri : I have a question about adaptations, especially to those of you

who have had many of your works adapted to film. I believe, according to [Francisco J.] Lombardi [1949], for both of you. My question is, whether you believe it helps, or whether you believe it doesn’t help to adapt a novel from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  51

to other forms of narration? What is lost or what is gained when a novel is adapted? Can the same story live on in many forms, or does the simple fact of adapting it, say to film, turn it into other stories, or is it the same? MVL : I believe that it is never the same. A novel is a story told with words,

and a film is a work in which the story is told fundamentally with images. Therefore, they are two different languages; I don’t believe there can be absolute fidelity between them. I am very discreet when speaking of adaptations, because I made an adaptation of one of my novels for cinema [Pantaleón y las visitadoras, 1963; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978] and I contributed also to its production and the making of the film; the result was really awful. If, at some point, you come across this version of Pantaleón y las visitadoras, please do not see it. Do not see it! Because it is an unmitigated disaster. So much so that I’ve never again wanted to take part in an adaptation to film of any of my works. When I’ve given authorization, I’ve simply gone to see the film afterward. Some are good films, for example, the adaptation by Lombardi of La ciudad y los perros seems to me a good movie; but it is a very shortened version; the story is extremely compressed. Lombardi’s version of Pantaleón y las visitadoras is also well made, but again, it’s a version of the story and in no way absolutely faithful to it. It shouldn’t be; it can’t be. With cinema, a writer needs to take the filmmakers’ liberties with a sporting attitude and accept that a filmmaker has the right to re-­create the story on which his film is based, and not interfere too much. In some cases, writers have participated, and the result has been positive. In my case, it wasn’t, and for this reason, I’ll never attempt to repeat what I did with Pantaleón y las visitadoras—­intervene directly in an adaptation. AC : I have sometimes written also for film and television; but writing for

film is very different from writing a novel, because when one writes for film or television, one writes by looking, hearing; when one writes a novel, one writes by reading. Besides, in a novel one is completely free; one can write a novel on—­I don’t know—­on a historical theme, but a film director can’t. He must have a budget to write and to direct a 52  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

film, often a large budget. I once wrote a police series for television, but television didn’t have the wherewithal: the producer had no resources; he had only one gun, so after the thieves would shoot, they would give the gun to the police and the police would shoot at the thieves with the same weapon. This doesn’t happen to a writer. MVL : I believe that a writer who writes for the cinema must be modest.

He must accept that he is merely a piece in a machine that he doesn’t control, quite different from what happens when he writes a novel in which he is the absolute lord of what he does. This is the great difference between a scriptwriter and a novelist. Lena Retamoso: In class, Professor Cueto mentioned some of the literary

influences on your work [Vargas Llosa] and we discussed several of them, but César Moro [Alfredo Quíspez Asín, 1903–­56] was mentioned only briefly. Since he is a little-­known Peruvian poet, I would like to ask you if you could speak more about him and how his work affected yours. MVL : I knew César Moro as a professor; he was professor of French at the

Leoncio Prado Military School. It was rumored that he was a poet; of course, in a military college, a poet was an irritant—­he represented exactly the opposite of the kind of masculinity that was the supreme value of the Military School. Besides, Moro was very quiet, exceedingly delicate, and to us, he seemed to lack virility; in classes, we drove him crazy; well, we thought we drove him crazy. But there was something in him that disconcerted us very much: he never called for the soldiers. The other professors, when we—­as we say in Peru—­“metíamos vicio” [gave them a hard time], played tricks and jokes on them, they would immediately call in a soldier. He would rush over, yell a couple of times, and we would immediately become silent and start to behave. César Moro, however, never called any soldiers, but put up with our tricks; it was very unusual. That was the image I had always kept of him. On entering the university I soon learned, in a distraught lecture on Moro’s death given by André Coyné [1927–­2015]—­a French professor who from miguel de cervantes to cÉsar moro  53

lived in Peru and had written on Vallejo and was Moro’s friend—­that the poet had written his most important work in French. That he had lived completely on the margins of Peruvian literary life; that he had lived many years in Paris; that he had been linked with the Surrealist group. I then became very interested in César Moro and began to read him. I discovered that Moro, among other things, was a great poet, but had cut his ties with his country, with his country’s language, with his own country’s writers, and had lived an entirely marginal life after leaving France. Shortly afterward, when I briefly researched his life, I found out that he had lived on the margins in France as well. Although he had formed part of the Surrealists, he was with them at a time when André Breton, for the strangest of reasons, accepted everything but homosexuality. They say it was because [Paul] Claudel called the Surrealists faggots, which awakened in Breton a kind of homophobia, and he refused to accept the homosexuals in the Surrealist group. César Moro was a homosexual. He must have felt marginalized even within the group—­he identified profoundly with its ideology, what we might call Surrealist morality. Breton later acknowledged Moro as a great poet, and he was again included in Surrealist anthologies. Not, however, until the end of Breton’s life, when Moro had already died. It fascinated me that for many years, he lived in absolute isolation while participating in Surrealist life; he wrote manifestos that nobody read because he didn’t publish them anywhere, but they remained with his papers, as we can see in Los anteojos de azufre [1958; The Sulphur Spectacles], gathered shortly after his death. Moro is one of the greatest tragic figures of Peruvian literature who is, little by little, becoming recognized, vindicated. In Peru and in Latin America, in the world of poetry and literature, he is now recognized for what he was: a great creator who represents within Surrealism his very own, original personality. But he was never recognized in his own lifetime. He died believing he was a poet without readers. Note

Translated from the Spanish by Anne J. Cruz.

54  mario vargas llosa and alonso cueto

Life and Literature

7. Efraín Kristal delivering the inaugural lecture of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

chapter 4

Discreet and Injudicious Heroes in the Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa Efraín Kristal

A number of Mario Vargas Llosa’s most memorable literary characters, like Santiago Zavala from Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), Lituma in Lituma en los Andes (1993; Death in the Andes, 1996), Flora Tristán in El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise, 2004), or Roger Casement in El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012) share a visceral or intuitive sense that something is painfully wrong with the social order into which they were born; or that something is not quite right with the way human beings are equipped to cope with the challenges of life, and that there are irrational, destructive forces—­within us or out there—­which we may never fully be able to tame. Vargas Llosa’s El héroe discreto (2013; The Discreet Hero, 2015) no longer fits this pattern. This is the first novel by Vargas Llosa in which the rules that govern the social order appear to be all right as they are, in which the regular flow of life appears to be moving in the right direction. And this sense that things are reasonably all right is a departure from his previous fiction. In Vargas Llosa’s socialist period, his novels depicted a brutal social order that would trample the freedom and basic human rights of individuals; and in the 1980s when he abandoned socialism, he gave pride of place to fanatics who could wreak havoc in their attempts to impose their utopian visions on society, unless their propensities for violence could be channeled to more innocuous practices in the erotic or artistic spheres. Since the 1990s Vargas Llosa’s novels were concerned with the evil that 57

can be unleashed when lawlessness rules; and they were also concerned with the effects that traumatic experiences in the collective or personal arena can have on individuals for generations to come. Since the 2010s, Vargas Llosa has shifted his focus from the damaging effects of fanaticism to the personal traumas that drive an individual to declare war on the world as they have found it (Kristal 2012, 129–­47). In El héroe discreto his concerns are no longer so dire. This is a world in which the social order does not pose a particular threat to individual freedom, or one in which human agency threatens to undermine the social order. In this novel, things can go wrong, and do go wrong when individuals are not willing to work for what they have, when they do not respect those who take care of their needs, or when they are motivated by greed or malice. In this narrative world there is corruption that gives one pause, and there are social mores that leave much to be desired, such as the penchant of Lima society for malicious gossip or the misinformation that can be generated by an irresponsible press; but the stability of society at large is not at stake. Indeed, the narrator of the novel hints that the main problems El héroe discreto addresses are those of a society experiencing progress and prosperity. This is the first novel by Vargas Llosa in which sticking to one’s ethical principles has long-­term benefits, even if there can be short-­term setbacks, and in which swerving away from these principles has long-­term costs, even if doing so results in short-­term benefits. In this book we are far from the moral world of Santiago Zavala of Conversación en La Catedral in the 1960s, in which only the immoral and corrupt have a chance to climb the social ladder. This is also not the world of Vargas Llosa’s early, injudicious heroes, like el Jaguar from La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966) who draws the wrong lesson from childhood experiences when he decides that if he does not trample on others, others will trample on him; or those heroes of the people, like Antonio the Counselor, or heroes of the new republican order like Moreira César—­both featured in La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984)—­whose religious or military fanaticism contribute to a collective cataclysm. Or those injudicious heroes from La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the 58  efraÍn kristal

Goat, 2001) who assassinate a dictator whom they once served without the foresight to address the corruption they themselves were a part of, and which remains after their act of regicide has taken place. It may be that Vargas Llosa feels better about the Peru that inspired this novel than the Peru or the Latin America that inspired his previous novels; but whatever the reason, El héroe discreto is unlike Vargas Llosa’s novels of the past. It is certainly a departure from the 2010 novel El sueño del celta, predicated on an injudicious, imperfect hero, a defender of human rights who grappled with the possibility that evil lies deep in the heart of man. El héroe discreto is a novel of a different kind: here most characters get their just deserts, redemption is available to all, and religion can be an effective mechanism to cope with one’s fate. In this fictional world the bark of its worst characters is invariably louder than their bite. As a novelist, Vargas Llosa has never had a softer or gentler touch. In the novel’s searching epigraph, Jorge Luis Borges suggests that the task of a writer of fiction is not only to create a labyrinth made of words, but also to provide his readers with a thread with which they can find their way out of the labyrinth. Vargas Llosa has always embraced this approach to literature. Vargas Llosa is not just an innovator of literary form; he is also a consummate storyteller. James Joyce was a master of the interior monologue, a seminal modernist literary technique that gave us the illusion that we were entering the inner worlds of his characters, but he was not a dynamic storyteller. In her famous essay on Hermann Broch, Hannah Arendt wrote that the Joycean modernist technique is incompatible with a story of dramatic intrigue or with an agile plot (Arendt 1949). Vargas Llosa’s early novels are counterexamples to this claim. Even his most sophisticated novels from a formal point of view, those that combine the interior monologue, indirect speech, and the use of intersecting temporal and special planes, depend on tight, interconnected plots in which the reader feels the agility of the storytelling: Vargas Llosa’s protagonists face urgent challenges, encounter characters who will change the course of their lives, and their situations will be fully played out until all of the threads of the plot are tied together. These stories can be set in the intimacy of the discreet and injudicious heroes  59

bourgeois home, the bustle of a modern city, the heat of revolutionary activity or even war; in a lush jungle, a desolate tundra, or across large historical canvasses. These are also works of literature at home with popular culture, melodrama, and even to touches of sentimentalism. Character in Vargas Llosa’s novels is revealed in situations and in verbal confrontations, which is why conversation matters more to Vargas Llosa than drawn-­out description; and the significance of an embodied human voice that appears to come alive in his works is apposite to one of the most remarkable aspects of his literary craft—­the most likely to be lost in translation—­his uncanny ability to suggest nuances of the spoken voice through the written word. The homage Vargas Llosa pays to Jorge Luis Borges with the epigraph of El héroe discreto is appropriate for other reasons as well. Borges introduced Latin American literature to the fantastic genre and to detective fiction, both of which play a role in Vargas Llosa’s new novel. Borges was also the Spanish translator of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, the novel that made Vargas Llosa realize that a single work of fiction can bring together more than one self-­contained, independent narrative line. In Faulkner’s novel the story of two escaped convicts from a chain gang working on railroad construction, and the story of two young people who are escaping their hometown because the girl of the couple is pregnant, are fully self-­contained. The whole, however, gains from the independent parts: each story feels more textured and nuanced as the readers perceive assonances and dissonances in the two narratives. In El héroe discreto, Vargas Llosa similarly explores two distinct, self-­ contained plots; one is set in Lima, and the other in Piura, a coastal city in the northern deserts of Peru. Vargas Llosa spent formative years of his life in each of these two cities, and they had already featured prominently in his novels and plays. In the new novel Piura is the setting of the story of Felícito Yanaqué, one of the two characters who justifies the novel’s title. In a recent essay Vargas Llosa has written about the “discreet heroism” of individuals who have no political influence and are not otherwise connected in a society prone to nepotism, and yet they are able to move forward with their lives without succumbing to corruption (2012, 141–­42). According 60  efraÍn kristal

to Vargas Llosa, these “discreet heroes” are the pillars of Latin America’s fledgling democracies. And he was obviously thinking of individuals of this kind when he invented Felícito Yanaqué, a self-­made man of humble origins who built a successful transportation business through honest hard work and perseverance. He is the novel’s hero because he has taken seriously his father’s most important inheritance, conveyed by the advice never to tolerate abuse. Felícito is willing to risk his life, his fortune, and even the lives of those he loves to follow his father’s precepts, in order to lead a life in which he will not suffer abuse or succumb to corruption. He is a “discreet” hero for both positive and negative reasons: positive in that he is not interested in any fame or reward that may come from his public stand against corruption; but negative to some degree in that there are aspects of his personal life he would have preferred to keep discreet when he feels he has no choice but to act according to what he believes is right. The events that precipitate the plot of Felícito Yanaqué’s story are an anonymous letter—­on the first page of the novel—­from an extortionist and his categorical refusal to give in to the extortion. The tone of the letter recalls “The Minions of Midas,” a story by Jack London in which extortionists write to their victims in a friendly, respectful, almost intimate manner, which perniciously belies the threats to the well-­being of the victim’s loved ones, but not to the victim himself. The second distinct plot of the novel, set in Lima, centers on Ismael Carrero, a wealthy man who owns a successful insurance company inherited from his father. Carrero is a widower whose twin sons are wastrels incapable of running the family business. After suffering a heart attack that appears to be fatal, and in his hospital bed, he overhears a conversation in which his two sons express contempt for him and delight at the prospect of his death. After overhearing the callous conversation, he decides to marry his female housekeeper so that she, and not they, will inherit the lion’s share of his fortune. In both the Felícito Yanaqué chapters set in Piura, and the Ismael Carrero chapters set in Lima, the personal lives of the two men, and of any number of people directly or indirectly associated with them, will be temporarily turned upside down; and this novel involves the vicissitudes of these events. The two distinct discreet and injudicious heroes  61

plots offer, with a light touch, many twists and turns in one of the most skillfully conceived of his novels. As with its Faulknerian antecedents, there are differences but also resonances between the two self-­contained stories with one element that links them in the latter part of the novel. Each of the independent plots focuses on a successful businessman, but the two businessmen represent different social classes. In both cases the man has an unhappy family situation, but the nature of the unhappiness is not identical. In both cases the man is concerned about his relationship with his male children, but the nature of the concern differs. Both stories involve potential or actual criminal activity, death threats, and threats of abduction, and treat the role of the press and the law in human affairs. One of the most attractive features of the novel is the reappearance—­or rather the re-­creation—­in each of the two main plots of characters from Vargas Llosa’s previous novels. In the Piura chapters Sergeant Lituma and his boss, Captain Silva, reappear. They are the police officers in charge of identifying Felícito Yanaqué’s extortionists. In the Lima chapters Don Rigoberto reappears along with his biological son, Fonchito, and with Lucrecia, the woman Rigoberto married after the death of his first wife. Along with Felícito Yanaqué, Don Rigoberto turns out to be the second “discreet hero” of the novel because he is willing to sacrifice his own well-­being, including his retirement pension, rather than succumb to the threats or bribes of his boss’s sons when they would like to take over their father’s fortune. Lituma, a native of Piura, features prominently in the Felícito Yanaqué chapters. He happens to be the most recurrent character in all of Vargas Llosa’s fiction. He is the only Vargas Llosa character who has appeared in all of his Peruvian settings: in the jungle, in the tundra, in the Andes, in Lima, and of course in Piura. His most recurrent role in Vargas Llosa’s novels is to serve as the everyman sidekick, as the perplexed Doctor Watson to Captain Silva’s self-­assured Sherlock Holmes. He shows good judgment and a calm demeanor when he undertakes a case with his superior power of deduction, although he is prone to minor professional lapses on account of harmless erotic idiosyncrasies. 62  efraÍn kristal

In “El visitante” (The visitor) a short story of the 1950s, Lituma observes with wonder the way his captain makes a deal with a hardened criminal to entrap another hardened criminal. Silva is true to his word when he does not arrest the hardened criminal who helped him to entrap the other one; but he leaves the betrayer alone in a desert on the outskirts of Piura where his enemies will certainly take deadly revenge. In this sordid milieu the criminal who betrays his fellow criminal is unpardonable according to the ethics of brutal criminals, but also of those who are expected to uphold the law; and something of this story will carry through to the novel in the set of values of its discreet hero for whom the betrayal of trust is far worse than breaking the law. In Lituma’s second appearance as a detective’s assistant, in ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986; Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987), he is involved in the investigation of a gruesome murder in which the indifference to the corruption Silva uncovers is more disheartening to Lituma than the crime itself. In Lituma en los Andes, Silva and Lituma are even more disheartened to discover that no one cares about a brutal massacre committed for no discernible reason. In both cases, Silva discovers the identity of the perpetrators, but no one is brought to justice. In El héroe discreto, Silva and Lituma uncover unpleasant elements of corruption, but these events are far less distressing than those in ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? or Lituma en los Andes. They do not involve any gruesome murders or massacres in environments where the sources of corruption and violence outstrip the ability of the law to prevail. In El héroe discreto the discovery of the facts makes a difference, law enforcement and the legal system are imperfect but ultimately effective, and the main hero of the novel, Felícito Yanaqué, is a model citizen who embodies the solution to problems that can only arise in an environment of prosperity. The reappearance of Don Rigoberto, Lucrecia and Fonchito is also of a different kind from that of their previous treatment in Vargas Llosa’s novels. When they were created in the 1988 novel Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990), Don Rigoberto takes refuge from the ordinariness of his everyday life as an insurance agent in his collection of erotic prints discreet and injudicious heroes  63

and in his sexual life, until he realizes that his erotic imagination was the catalyst to an intimate relationship between his son and his second wife. Don Rigoberto, Fonchito, and Lucrecia reappear in Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998) where Rigoberto and Lucrecia reconcile thanks to the machinations of Fonchito, even though Lucrecia acknowledges that she continues to harbor sexual feelings toward her stepson. In El héroe discreto, the erotic relationship is limited to the adults, who are now appropriately concerned about sexual abuse on children and adolescents; Lucrecia is a model parent, and there is no mention, recollection, or suggestion that she ever had a sexual liaison with her stepson. Fonchito, in El héroe discreto, is as mysterious and intractable as he was in the previous novels but is not sexually threatening. On the contrary, he is now presented as a possible target of sexual abuse, and he has also become a threat of a different kind: a threat to Rigoberto’s comfortable sense of himself as an agnostic. Fonchito, devoted to bible study and concerned with matters of good and evil, is the catalyst for a reawakening in Rigoberto of dormant religious inclinations. Indeed, a respectful and even a sympathetic view toward spirituality and the supernatural inform the two main plots of the novel. In the Piura chapters, Felícito Yanaqué’s best friend is a woman who has supernatural premonitions about Felícito’s life that are always on the mark. The Lima chapters also involve a supernatural element, presented through a subtle, sophisticated literary technique, involving the recurrent appearances of Edilberto Torres, a man Fonchito claims to have seen, and who seems to be intimately acquainted with the family. Edilberto Torres might be a fabrication by Fonchito or a real presence, and Vargas Llosa is deliberately ambiguous about whether Torres is a real person or a disturbing product of Fonchito’s imagination. Vargas Llosa’s approach to Edilberto Torres coincides with Jorge Luis Borges’s view that ambiguity in life and ambiguity in literature can be profoundly different. In life, ambiguity is a matter of either/or, but in literature, it can be a matter of both/and. As Borges would have it: “In real time, in history, whenever someone is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates and 64  efraÍn kristal

loses the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion. In that time, for example, Hamlet is both sane and insane” (Borges 1999, 279).1 Vargas Llosa is masterful in the presentation of ambiguity, as he relates dialogues between Fonchito and Torres that are narrated with the same “telescoping” technique with which all of the other conversations in a realistic register are also presented. And the skepticism of Don Rigoberto and Lucrecia about the reality of the character is offset by their own doubts and by two other characters who have been asked to investigate the matter: a psychologist who is impressed by Fonchito’s maturity and sincerity, and a priest who is persuaded that Fonchito’s encounters with this man has profound spiritual implications that have moved him deeply. At times Rigoberto and Lucrecia are afraid that Torres could be a predatory pedophile attracted to their son; at times the joke that he might be the devil himself is given some ironic credence. One of Fonchito’s accounts of an encounter with Edilberto Torres reminds Don Rigoberto of the appearance of the devil to Adrien Leverkun in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Leverkun thinks he made a pact with the devil but wonders if the encounter was a product of his own delirious, artistic imagination. With exquisite irony and ambiguity, the devil in Thomas Mann’s novel tells Leverkun that his illness and delusional state of mind “enables you to perceive me and without it, surely you would not see me. Do I therefore belong to your subjective mind? Many thanks!” (Mann 1999, 250). The allusion to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus serves Vargas Llosa’s narrator to underscore the subtle ways in which a literary work can introduce a supernatural dimension in a realistic literary register; and it also serves to highlight the most important literary technique Vargas Llosa has been rehearsing in the last decade. The superimposition of spatial and chronological planes has always been part of Vargas Llosa’s repertoire of literary forms, as has been the use of ambiguity, hidden elements, or elements that are playing a role in a narrative even though they are never mentioned. Starting with La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; discreet and injudicious heroes  65

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982) some thirty-­five years ago, Vargas Llosa created the first in a series of novels—­including El hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989) and Elogio de la madrastra (1988; In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990)—­with a new literary technique in which a realistic register alternates with another literary register that is unambiguously the product of a fantasy. In El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise, 2004) the seed of a new aesthetic by Vargas Llosa was planted in a description of a painting by Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon. In this painting a group of women have a vision inspired by an episode in the Old Testament. According to the narrator of Vargas Llosa’s novel: “The true miracle of the painting was not the apparition of those biblical characters in the mind of those humble peasant women. The miracle was to have been able in that canvas to have finished with prosaic realism and to have captured a new reality in which the objective and the subjective, the real and the supernatural are confused, become indivisible” (2004, 245).2 In the last ten years, Vargas Llosa has been working to achieve the creation of a new reality in his narrative fiction and in his plays in which the objective and the subjective, the real and the supernatural, are confused and become indivisible. The first major breakthrough to this end was the 2006 novel Travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl, 2007). In this novel, for the first time in Vargas Llosa’s narrative, the line between prosaic existence and imagination, present in his novels of the 1980s, has not just become blurred, but disappears altogether. Indeed, the female protagonist of the novel, the “bad girl,” is as much a realistic character as she is the product of a dream. She appears and disappears from the life of Ricardo Somocurcio, the first-­person narrator of the novel, in the most extraordinary circumstances, and he is unable to differentiate, as the narrator puts it, “the world in which she lived from that in which she said she lived” (2006, 175).3 Every time she appears in the novel, she enters the world of Ricardo Somocurcio’s drab reality as if she were a woman of flesh and blood; but she is also a fantasy, a literary creation that has stepped into the world of the living, as in Julio Cortázar’s fictions in which the world 66  efraÍn kristal

of fiction and the world of the everyday are connected as the two sides of a Moebius strip. A consummate master of narrative fiction, Vargas Llosa is able to present his character with sufficient ambiguities, mysteries, and ellipses, so that each chapter of the novel can be read as either a fantasy or a reality. In Travesuras de la niña mala the inability to differentiate reality from fiction by the character and by the narrator is also a powerful way to explore how difficult it is to come to terms with a hard truth. The great revelation in the novel is the mysterious past of the “bad girl.” She was a Peruvian girl of indigenous origins, the daughter of Andean immigrants to Lima who grew up in sordid poverty. When Ricardo discovers the bad girl’s Peruvian roots, his initial focus on her as the object of his erotic fantasies is transformed into compassion for her suffering: “I imagined her, as a little girl, living in the promiscuity and squalor of those precarious cardboard shacks on the shores of the Rimac River” (2006, 322).4 As a child she suffered severe trauma associated with sexual violence, and, as a result, the narrator understands her needs to escape into a world of fiction: “To dwell in that fiction gave her reasons to feel more secure, less threatened, than to live in the realm of truth. For everybody it is more difficult to live in truth than it is to live in a world of lies. But this is all the more so in her situation. It will take a lot for her to get accustomed to truth” (2006, 267).5 This commentary is elaborated in the novel by a specialist in torture and trauma: “She and all those who lived trapped in a world of fantasies that they create in order to abolish the realities of life, know and don’t know what they are doing. The borderline between the two things becomes eclipsed for a while and then reappears” (2006, 268).6 In El héroe discreto, the issue that dissolves the line between reality and fiction and that permits ambiguous readings of the same events is no longer sexual trauma, but rather the search for some kind of spiritual truth above and beyond the power of reason. It is instructive to note that in El héroe discreto there are two female characters who had pasts similar to that of the “bad girl.” One of them responds to the traumas of her discreet and injudicious heroes  67

abusive past by turning to a religious sense of penance and resignation that will become restorative and healing, this despite her own expectations because she did not turn to religion in order to find personal salvation in the here and now. The effects of sexual trauma in the two minor but significant subplots of El héroe discreto to which I am alluding are the most somber aspects of what turns out to be the least tragic of all of Vargas Llosa’s novels. It is also Vargas Llosa’s most optimistic. This is the optimism of someone who feels that the inherent imperfections of individuals and societies are not insurmountable obstacles to a reasonable collective life. It is also an optimism tinged with an attraction to religion, a sense that religion can be a boon to believers and nonbelievers alike. The spiritual worldview that resonates with Fonchito’s theological meditations at times echoes the poetry of César Vallejo and other times the theology of Saint Augustine. Don Rigoberto and the narrator of the novel are both impressed with a composition that Fonchito writes for his school. In it he states that God is inherently good, that he created man and gave him freedom, but that human freedom can be used both for good and for evil. This sympathetic view of theology and religion is a long way from Vargas Llosa’s treatment of the priest who burns the Green House in La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968), from his satirical treatment of religion in Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), or from his tragic account of a priest who allows the martyrdom of a community in La guerra del fin del mundo. But it is not inconsistent with some underlying motifs in the novels of the last decade. At the beginning of this essay I pointed out that some of the most memorable characters in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, as late as El sueño del celta of 2010, have strong intimations that something is painfully wrong with the social order into which they were born, or that something is not quite right with the way human beings are equipped to cope with the challenges of life, and that there are irrational destructive forces we might never be able to tame. El héroe discreto is not so pessimistic; it turns away from most dire implications of these intimations. It is arguably the most entertaining 68  efraÍn kristal

novel Vargas Llosa has ever written along with La tía Julia y el escribidor. The novel has opened the door to religion as a solution to the problems Vargas Llosa’s major characters have been grappling with since the 1950s, whether or not—­as has always been the case in Vargas Llosa’s literature—­ any momentous human concern can ever be fully addressed in the here and now. Notes

1. “En el tiempo real, en la historia, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina y pierde las otras; no así en el ambiguo tiempo del arte, que se parece al de la esperanza y al del olvido. Hamlet, en ese tiempo, es cuerdo y es loco” (1989, 353). 2. “El verdadero milagro de aquel cuadro no era la aparición de esos personajes bíblicos en la mente de esas humildes campesinas. El milagro era haber conseguido en aquella tela acabar con el prosaico realismo una realidad nueva, en la que lo objetivo y lo subjetivo, lo real y lo sobrenatural, se confundían, indivisibles” (2003, 286). 3. “le era ya muy difícil diferenciar el mundo en que vivía de aquel en el que decía vivir.” Translations into English of quotes from Travesuras de la niña mala are mine. 4. “la imaginaba de pequeñita en la promiscuidad y la mugre de esas casuchas contrahechas de las orillas del Rímac.” 5. “Vivir en esa ficción le daba razones para sentirse más segura, menos amenazada, que vivir en la verdad. Para todo el mundo es más difícil vivir en la verdad que en la mentira. Pero, más para alguien en su situación.” 6. “Ella, y todos quienes viven buena parte de su vida encerrados en fantasías que se construyen para abolir la verdadera vida, saben y no saben lo que están haciendo. La frontera que se les eclipsa por períodos y luego reaparece.” Selected Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. “The Achievement of Hermann Broch.” Kenyon Review 11, no. 3 (1949): 476–­83. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The False Problem of Ugolino.” In Selected Non-­Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, 277–­79. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. —. Nueve ensayos dantescos. [Nine Dantesque essays] Vol. 3 of Obras completas [Complete works]. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989. discreet and injudicious heroes  69

Kristal, Efraín. “From Utopia to Reconciliation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, edited by Efraín Kristal and John King, 129–­47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2012). Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Vargas Llosa, Mario. La civilización del espectáculo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2007. Edited and translated by John King as Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). —. El héroe discreto. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2013. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Discreet Hero (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). —. El paraíso en la otra esquina. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2003. Translated by Natasha Wimmer as The Way to Paradise (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). —. Travesuras de la niña mala. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Bad Girl (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

70  efraÍn kristal

chapter 5

A Life Worthy of a Novel J. J. Armas Marcelo

Ernest Hemingway’s exceptional story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936) can serve as an emblematic reflection on the life of the writer Mario Vargas Llosa. In Hemingway’s tale, the most beautiful story in the world, according to Gabriel García Márquez—­as he once confessed to his friend Apuleyo Mendoza, while walking around Paris—­ the hunter, Macomber, sets out for the jungle each day with the hope and faith that he will find a lion to kill with a well-­aimed rifle shot. Macomber, through his tenacious hunter’s routine, engrossed in his destiny and in his objective, reflects on and thinks about his fear every day in the jungle as he awaits the appearance of his enemy and prey, the great lion of the forest. He trembles as he waits for the beast to appear. He feels that the solitude devours him; he feels that fear permeates his bones with a damp cold, despite the jungle’s infernal embrace. He trembles with dread—­he stands alone before the imminent danger of the lion that, at any moment, will appear out of the shadows. But this fear, this feeling of terror in the face of the beast, is what keeps him alive, in a state of alertness, his breathing ragged as he awaits the great reward, the reward that stokes both his faith and his fear. This is what writing literature is like for Vargas Llosa: an insatiable dedication to attaining an objective, a daily routine, a terror about the book he wants to write, a terror both metaphorical and alluring, Francis Macomber’s lion. For a vocational and professional hunter, to hunt the lion is his destiny, but that—­his routine, his professional talent, 71

8. J. J. Armas Marcelo, Jaime Manrique, and Carlos Franz in a ccny “Conversatorio” during the 2016 seminar of the Cátedra. Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

his tenacity, his perseverance—­does not prevent the fear that the hunter feels in the moment when the lion appears before him and he must shoot and he must not miss. Adventure was a constant for a writer like Ernest Hemingway, a man who loved traveling, going to Africa to hunt big game, fishing (including for German submarines), playing, and writing about the war and human passions, loving beautiful women (some of his romances were secret, others very well known), plotting and conspiring as if he were a secret agent, having new adventures in grand hotels, ever attuned to world events. He is not the only one. Joseph Conrad, another writer whom Vargas Llosa admired, lived almost his entire life on the sea about which he wrote and in eccentric places (places not geographically central in his time; far-­flung places, places not part of the world from which he came), which he brought to his extraordinary literature. These two well-­known examples are more than sufficient, but there are many admirable writers who turned their lives into a constant adventure, in such a way that their literary writing, 72 j.j. armas marcelo

their literature, is the result of Francis Macomber’s grand experience, that experience that all writers carry inside them, the experience of having faith in their work, in their perseverance, in their own self-­worth. In the case of Vargas Llosa, his life becomes entangled with his writing to such an extent that, in my estimation, one of the novelist’s vital characteristics, in both his real life and in his literary writing, is risk. Constant risk—­hence also, as Efraín Kristal has noted, the changes of register in his novels—­and an insatiable curiosity about everything that happens before his eyes, be it in reality, in fiction, or in the texts of other writers and colleagues through whom he intellectually nourishes and feeds his knowledge. Vargas Llosa always maintained that a literary vocation comes from some remote and lost place in the childhood of one who would later become a life-­long, full-­time writer. Either because his or her own childhood was a disaster, filled with misfortune and sorrow, a traumatic childhood that caused him to reject the real world and, instead, to imagine and write fictitious worlds that allowed his soul to escape into imagination, worlds that eased the absence of love and affection; or else the opposite, the childhood was a paradise filled with caresses, in which the child’s every whim was carried out, in which he or she was the monarch of the house, adored by family, by friends, by everyone in the familial and domestic realm. Born “fatherless” at 101 Boulevard Parra, Arequipa, Peru, on March 28, 1936, Vargas Llosa is, during his childhood, the king of the house, the pampered one in the family, the little prince spoiled by his mother, apparently a widow, and his aunts, while his uncle, Lucho, and his grandfather, Pedro, applaud and fawn over Marito’s literary “baby steps,” the little darling whom no one can contradict without first explaining very clearly the reasons for the contradiction. His father, apparently dead, is the absence that Marito remembers each night as he kisses the photo on his nightstand, the photograph of the man he most admires, his father up in heaven, as they have told the little darling ever since he can remember. Everything in this fussed-­over little boy’s life occurs quickly and happily. His life is a joy until he turns eleven years old. Then, unexpectedly, his father becomes flesh and blood once more, descends from heaven and a life worthy of a novel  73

reappears in the family. “You are going to meet your father,” his mother tells him, out of the blue, on a day apparently like any other, a day that the coddled little boy will never forget. A new life begins. Gone is the paradise over which Marito reigned, to the applause and smiling acquiescence of his entire family. On the day of his father’s “resurrection,” Marito intuits that his entire existence is going to change. The man who, just twenty-­four hours earlier, did not exist, the man in the photograph he had kissed every night with such unforgettable devotion, is an apparition who has come to change the order of the world that the boy had spent the first ten years of his life creating. There are, in my opinion, some nods to this—­perhaps deformed, or aggrandized memories of the time—­in Elogio de la madras-​ tra (1988; In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990) and in Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997; The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998), the two novels aptly categorized as Aeolic by literary critics and by the writer himself. The Father’s Arrival

For Marito, that man recently descended from heaven is a stranger, a hard, unsentimental man who believes that his son, spoiled to excess by the Llosa family, needs “a man’s upbringing,” something which, until this moment, he has sorely lacked. “Then,” Vargas Llosa would write many years later, “when he appeared, I understood fear, terror, unhappiness.” Gone were the caresses: the trauma was his father, the man who was going to change things in his house, the man who was going to change everything, even happiness, his way of life. For the very first time, Vargas Llosa feels the need to flee the lost paradise, but he is a boy on the cusp of adolescence; he cannot, they will not let him, move on. His father imposes a strict schedule: spartan, athletic, no room for any caprice whatsoever. Then, still not content, he forces Mario to enroll in Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, on the Pacific Ocean. He maintains that his son needs a different kind of education in order to become the strong, hard man he wants him to be. He believes that the Llosa family has “feminized” him with all their indulgences, by allowing him to play at the “spoiled little girls’ game” of writing poetry. 74 j.j. armas marcelo

Some of the things I outline here are seminal aspects of Vargas Llosa’s first eighteen years and significant in terms of his vocation as a writer. In order to know fully “the secrets” of that life, the childhood of an adolescent writer who would, in time, become a universal touchstone of twentieth-­ and twenty-­first-­century literature, we must delve into the pages of El pez en el agua (1993; A Fish in the Water, 1994). According to the novelist from Arequipa, Jorge Eduardo Benavides, El pez en el agua is “a book of memories,” one that “upends the Peruvian political universe, alternating biographical episodes that give an account of his life with those that reveal his recent journey into politics.” It bears remembering that Vargas Llosa wrote this book immediately after losing the Peruvian presidential election to Alberto Fujimori. The writer’s state of mind moves between crushing disappointment and the anxiety of returning to the place he never should have left: literature. One must think, in all fairness, that El pez en el agua is not only “a book of memories” written with the nerve of an indomitable critical consciousness, but also, to a large extent, a settling of accounts with his immediate past (politics) and a retrospective of his life, from the time of his earliest memories—­complete with the “resurrection” of his father in the middle of paradise, a paradise ever since lost—­until he becomes the writer he wants to be. Thus, this book is his “first” return to literature after his foray into politics, a time and a passion that many of us, his closest friends, understood but never shared with him. It was not without reason that, when Vargas Llosa lost the election, his friend, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, issued the best of the verdicts about that episode: “I’m happy for Vargas Llosa, I’m sad for Peru.” Politician or Writer

What would have happened if Vargas Llosa, sporadically and temporarily passionate about politics, had won the election on that occasion? We can never be sure about something that did not happen, but we can say that we would have lost the writer who came after that “failure,” and the writer he was before politics came along to hypnotize him. Had he become president of Peru, would Vargas Llosa have been the writer, the novelist, a life worthy of a novel  75

the thinker, the conscience that he became, after 1990, of his own country, of the Western Hemisphere, of democracy and of the entire world? But it is not only in El pez en el agua that we clearly see biographical elements from Vargas Llosa’s life; they are also present in some of his most famous novels. I will mention three: La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966), La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), and Elogio de la madrastra. While La ciudad y los perros and El pez en el agua are both written with the fury and tenacity of the rebel fighting against an adverse world—­in the first, the adolescent boy, “incarcerated” for two years in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima to “make a man of himself ”; in the second, with the rage and faith in literature of a writer whose political defeat signified the triumph of literature in his life—­in the latter two, we see a “literary game” that is quite different. In La tía Julia y el escribidor, an autofiction novel, and, to my mind, the most Flaubertian of all his novels, and in Elogio de la madrastra, there are biographical elements of gallantry, erotic fragments that unveil the “secret” or domestic life of the writer Vargas Llosa had already become, details that the reader familiar with the writer’s life discovers camouflaged in the characters that people the stories; experiences that nod to Vargas Llosa’s hedonistic vigor, his first marriage, his divorce from Julia Urquidi, and his second marriage to his cousin Patricia, “whom I had the good fortune to marry more than forty-­five years ago,” as he put it in his Nobel acceptance speech in December of 2010 in Stockholm. And so, at this stage, we can identify certain characteristics—­ constants—­in Vargas Llosa, the writer, beginning with his conviction, from a very young age, that it was necessary to escape from the sphere of his surroundings in order to transform himself into the writer he wanted to be. Even as a young child, he is a voracious reader, and this felicitous mania leads him to want to emulate the great writers—­from Salgari to Dumas, from Jules Verne to Mark Twain—­who have astonished and transported him through their books. The obstinate young reader wants to be, and will become, a great universal writer. This vocational conviction becomes, in short order, an unbridled passion, both exclusive and 76 j.j. armas marcelo

excluding, an internal fire that calls him to work each day like a laborer, with a set schedule, like an ordinary worker, and to flee from what he has seen so frequently in his country and in Latin America: the weekend writers, the writers given over to il dolce far niente, to the bohemian lifestyle, to sterile discussion, the writers who devote themselves to the relentlessness of writing, but who never actually write. The Argentine Roberto Arlt would write a ferocious essay, “The Failed Writer,” in which he describes the sins of writers who declaim publicly, even after convincing themselves of their own fruitlessness, writers who promise themselves, every Monday of every week, that they will begin writing a novel that they never begin to write and thus never write anything at all. For Arlt—­and for Vargas Llosa as well—­the failed writer is a writer who does not write. On the other hand, on the other side of the horizon, is the writer who dedicates himself, body and soul, to literary writing, like a person possessed, as John Updike put it, by the vice of writing. Vargas Llosa would call this personal mania the “tapeworm,” a metaphorical expression that perfectly sums up the way a writer feels when writing becomes a biological and physiological necessity. Literary Passion, or the “Tapeworm”

A tapeworm is a worm that, from inside a human’s intestine, obliges its host to eat constantly on its behalf. The human eats and eats but the insatiable tapeworm does not allow the human to grow fat. And so, the writer’s hunger for writing does not abate, but rather, grows—­like literature for Vargas Llosa—­and it becomes an insatiable being that turns the writer into a “creature of writing.” This is how editor Carlos Barral, who discovered Vargas Llosa and who is one of my most vital, intellectual, and literary masters, defined him in the text that served as prologue to the first edition of Los cachorros (1967; The Cubs, 1975): bête à écrire, a “creature of writing.” In order to understand fully the thesis of the “tapeworm,” one must read Cartas a un joven novelista (1977; Letters to a Young Novelist, 2002), in which Vargas Llosa didactically explains to aspiring novelists the gambles a life worthy of a novel  77

and passions of literary writing, the demands, sensations, depressions, and sacrifices required to achieve excellence through a literary text. But it is not only in this work that we find the keys to his vocation as a great writer, to what always made him feel like a great writer, on par with those he considered his masters—­Victor Hugo, Flaubert or Faulkner, for example—­we also find traces, bread crumbs dropped in the forest as in a children’s story, in two other exemplary works: Gabriel García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971; Gabriel García Márquez: Story of a Deicide) and La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary (1975;The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary, 1986). By the age of seventeen or eighteen, at which time he is studying and working at various journalistic pursuits in Lima, Marito stops being Marito and becomes Varguitas, his literary vocation having already grown a great deal by means of the “tapeworm.” Vargas Llosa observes, in concordance with the rest of the world, that Peru, that Lima, the city in which he lives, is not an adequate environment, either geographically, socially, or culturally for the writer that he wants to be. His conversations with Sebastián Salazar Bondy (1924–­65), a Peruvian writer whom he admired a great deal, and his friendly and intellectual affinities with Raúl Porras Barrenechea (1897–­1960), convince him: he must leave, abandon Peru, move to Europe, to Paris—­the city in which everything is possible, Hugo’s city, Balzac’s city, the city of all great nineteenth-­century literary fiction. Varguitas in Paris

Leaving Peru becomes, for the aspiring young writer, a necessary step in fulfilling his destiny. To be clear: a manifest destiny, a path filled with trials and tribulations that must be trodden relentlessly and without pause. And here we find once again Vargas Llosa’s character, his exclusive and excluding passion for literature: he leaves his home, his city, his friends, his environment, his country, his people. In essence, he travels toward the world of literature, on a course to discover Paris, his immediate cultural destiny, the city in which his intellectual and literary anxieties and ambitions will begin to be satisfied, though not quieted. The Paris of 78 j.j. armas marcelo

Sartre and Camus, the Paris of the great theaters, the grand operas, an international city, where one can see films from all over the globe. The Paris of liberty, a freedom the budding novelist seeks in order to carry out his unconditional pact with the “tapeworm,” with literature, with writing. In Paris he will write La ciudad y los perros, a novel that he had begun writing in the cafés of Madrid, his first European destination. In Paris he will have to go to work in radio after spending all of his Peruvian scholarship money, and he will even work as a ghostwriter for a wealthy Latin American woman. In Paris he will finally meet Carlos Barral, the editor who, on a gray and boring afternoon, sitting in his editorial office in Barcelona, discovers an unusual narrative text that would, in the early years of the 1960s, initiate a new era; who discovers a new, great, universal novelist, a youth of scarcely twenty who invites him to Paris and with whom he speaks tirelessly of literature during his stay in the City of Lights. Barral discovers, to his astonishment, that the young Peruvian is a dyed-­in-­the-­wool literary fanatic. He could not care less about the bohemian life of other Latin Americans in Paris: he does not drink alcohol, he is quitting smoking, he lives like a monk devoted to an exclusive and solitary mission: writing literature. That young man speaks to him of his current projects, of his finished novel, of other novels he wants to write in the future, novels in which autobiographical traces will reappear, such as the character of Zavalita in Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), which he will write in London, risking, once again, his family and estate, domesticity and property, for the one paramount thing in his life: literature. And so, were it not for his literary life, both the Vargas Llosa of those days and the Vargas Llosa of today, would die of the tedium of I say it because I believe it and I believe it because I see it and I see it because I know. Vargas Llosa feeds himself on literature while he feeds the tapeworm that is, for him, the writing of literature. Another of his novels that would become a masterwork is La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968). As in almost all of his books, almost all of his novels, it is the memory of his early childhood that transforms his a life worthy of a novel  79

writing into a masterwork. The title of La casa verde alludes to a brothel in the city of Piura, in the north of Peru, where the young Vargas Llosa would go with his friends. Recently, in 2010, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, all manner of real-­life figures began to surface in Peru, people whom Vargas Llosa had turned into fictional elements and characters in his novels. “Varguitas was a very polite and well-­mannered boy,” declared an old prostitute from the Casa Verde to the Peruvian newspapers. She went on to ask the Nobel winner to “come visit her in Piura.” Vargas Llosa’s first “literary agent” also surfaced during this period of surprising apparitions: the cadet who served as intermediary in the sale of the love letters that other cadets in Leoncio Prado would commission for their girlfriends from Alberto, the Poet, in La ciudad y los perros. Rupture with the Left

And so here we have a Peruvian novelist of scarcely thirty, who left Peru in 1959, lived successively in Madrid, Paris, and London and finally settled in Barcelona, where his editor and brand-­new literary agent, Carmen Balcells, lived. We have a young, acclaimed writer who, thanks to ten years of intensive and extensive work, has published three novels that may be considered, even today, as exceptional within the global literary context of the twentieth century. But, in his adventurous life, something very important has occurred: the “Padilla affair” in Havana. Until that moment, although he had already had private skirmishes with the Cuban authorities, Vargas Llosa had publicly offered his active support to the Cuban Revolution, a revolution that he understood—­along with other European and Latin American intellectuals—­as one “with a human face.” Vargas Llosa’s support ends when the “Padilla affair” reveals to him the brutal reality that Cuba was living through under the Castro regime, the decrepit, ruined reality still experienced there today. Vargas Llosa places himself on the front lines of written protest. In this role, he writes manifestos, signs them, makes declarations that do not merely fall on deaf ears. He confronts “socialist” Cuba. Castro and his henchmen exile him from the paradise of lies in which so many writers from all over the 80 j.j. armas marcelo

world remain immersed. And it is there, in this determination, with the same discipline with which he submerges himself in literature for more than eight hours every day, with that same passion, that Vargas Llosa articulates his rupture from the conventional Left, which he calls “analogue and rhetorical.” With the same discipline, the same decision and, of course, with all the risks associated with placing oneself in opposition to that supposed Cuban battleship, stony and luminous, that was the Cuban Revolution at the end of 1968. Writing as Risk

We have been speaking about the constant risk in Vargas Llosa’s adventurous and literary life, a life like that of a character in a Conrad novel, to use one of his favorite writers as an example. This risk is carried over into many of his critical writings, many of his essays and, of course, many of his novels. Efraín Kristal wrote recently that Vargas Llosa was not only our Flaubert, but also our Balzac. But with a literary fearlessness even greater than that of the great French novelist: Balzac does not change registers, his literature is unique, lush, tumultuous; its seeking to contain the entire world within the pages of The Human Comedy. For Balzac, literature is not only a way to pay his economic debts, but also a way to become indebted, dedicating, as he did, all his time to literature, to writing immoderately (according to legend, he once wrote a novel in a single night). For Balzac, literature is a “tapeworm” that both enslaves and, contradictorily, gratifies him: he risks everything for the sake of a single missive, for his project of encompassing the world within the pages he writes. But he does not take this risk in any register other than his own. Conversely, Vargas Llosa changes register from season to season. From the three aforementioned masterworks, he will later extract the seeds of smaller works such as Historia de Mayta (1984; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986), ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (1986; Who Killed Palomino Molero?, 1987), and El hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989). He will also produce another major work, La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984), a book that some consider his masterpiece, in which, for the first time, his fiction leaves Peru a life worthy of a novel  81

and unfolds instead in a far-­flung setting in Brazil, in a different register and different geography that surprised readers and critics alike, making that novel Vargas Llosa’s War and Peace. It is a work in which the novelist emphasizes the dichotomy contained in his earlier novels: the struggle between Ariel and Caliban, between civilization and barbarism. Vargas Llosa chooses civilization at all costs and, in his novels, describes and recounts the horrors of religious and ideological fanaticism, the horrors and the failure of populism and autocracy. Vargas Llosa chooses freedom. He chooses democracy, despite what some people may say, and this stance transforms him into a moral reference point for the rest of the world, a reference point in which civil ethics and literary aesthetic go hand in hand, even though the world often takes issue with him and actual reality does not always prove him right. It does not matter. Vargas Llosa insists, as he advises many young writers, that they must uphold their standards, remain true to what they believe in as well as to literature, if they hope, at some point in their lives, to become the writers they wish to be. Despite his many decades working in Europe, Vargas Llosa continues to visit Peru. His country (most especially in certain published opinions and within particular political circles), sometimes receives him with a sullen expression if not outright rejection. It does not matter. Vargas Llosa risks, insists, perseveres in his work, in his opinions; little by little he smooths out his defects, the many that he claims to have (and certainly he does, though not so many as all that). Faced with the political and economic situation in Peru, these visits trouble him; they also make him curious. They spur him to try to understand his country even better, a country he once called, in a journalistic and literary report in which he speaks of the Peruvian mestizo, “the country of a thousand faces.” Having become a universally recognized figure, both loved and hated by Peruvians, his political moment arrives—­another exclusive and excluding vocational pursuit. And Vargas Llosa tosses his hat into the ring of political struggle and presents himself as a candidate for president in the 1990 elections. He loses the election and, once again, leaves Peru. The result will be the literary reflection mentioned earlier: El pez en el agua. 82 j.j. armas marcelo

A Book of Memories

I want to take a moment here to highlight my thoughts about this book of memories. It is very important, as important as it is necessary, to read it in order to understand Vargas Llosa’s trajectory as a universal writer. There, in its pages, everything is synthesized: his political struggles and his literary risks, his insatiable intellectual curiosity and the astonishing work that he puts in every day in order to become a better novelist today than he was yesterday. He always says that writing does not come easily to him—­he has always said this and has repeated it on numerous occasions. But I do not believe it. I believe that Vargas Llosa’s skill is so great and all-­encompassing that, though they may resist him, each and every register ends up seduced by his will and by the immense force of the smith’s labor through which he forges his literature. For Vargas Llosa, too much ease in literature, like the bohemian lifestyle, is the writer’s worst enemy: to see and to feel that everything flows, word upon word, in a natural way, like breathing, like blood coursing through the veins, to feel the pleasure of a juggler performing a trick with surpassing ease can be and, in fact, is, a mistake. But the laborer who does his work year in and year out with great discipline becomes an excellent goldsmith precisely because of this effort, discipline, and perseverance. This is, in my opinion, the case with Vargas Llosa. During his electoral campaign for the presidency of Peru, Vargas Llosa stopped writing. The “tapeworm” demands a dedication both exclusive and excluding; one must continually stoke the fire so that its flame continues to blaze internally and externally, but politics is a mature woman who, like Circe with Odysseus, bewitches in such a way that it immobilizes its prey until, by dint of sheer miracle, it manages an escape. What he never gave up during that climactic and passionate period in his life was reading. In several print interviews, and I believe also in the aforementioned book of memories, Vargas Llosa confesses that he read Luis de Góngora, the Baroque Spanish poet, who is very difficult to read and even to understand. But this is how Vargas Llosa is: while everyone else rests, he reads, writes, works. This is how friend and former prime a life worthy of a novel  83

minister Pedro Cateriano remembers that era, and later ones as well. He told me about a time when he invited Vargas Llosa to spend the weekend at his beach house. Vargas Llosa arrived, went into the ocean, swam for fifteen minutes, lay in the sun for ten more minutes and then sequestered himself from everyone and everything, disappearing into a book for hours, while the other guests drank and chatted amiably. Both the novelist Juan García Hortelano and the editor Carlos Barral told me, on more than one occasion, the anecdote about the Vargas Llosa family vacation, when the writer was still married to Julia Urquidi, to the seaside village of Calafell, in the Spanish province of Tarragona. The Vargas Llosa family arrived, unpacked their suitcases, and went down to the beach. Julia Urquidi stayed on the beach, sunbathing, and Mario, with the flimsiest excuse, returned to the Barral’s house, where the family was staying, to type out whatever text came to him in that moment or any other text that had been obsessing him from an earlier time. There are legends told about the writer that describe him as a voracious reader, professorial, an insatiable “creature of writing.” Après Peruvian Politics: La fiesta del Chivo

After his political defeat, Vargas Llosa returned to the great glory of his life: literature. Some of the titles that he published in the nineties, whether essays or novels, were not masterworks and were not considered as such by critics. But in 1994 he received, quite belatedly, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize awarded to writers of literature in the Spanish language. In that same year he became a member of the Spanish Royal Academy. During these years, as I have said, Vargas Llosa dedicated himself to writing and to publishing essays and plays, as though he were reexamining himself, repairing and oiling the pistons and other parts that had made him an accomplished writer. During the nineties Vargas Llosa made a full recovery as a universal writer. And it was in 2000, in Madrid, that he published an extraordinary novel, his great masterwork, an almost perfect novel, written in the classical style of the best writers of the nineteenth century, but also employing, without losing any of its 84 j.j. armas marcelo

literariness, a more modern and cinematographic mode: La fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2001). “The Goat” is the nickname that Dominicans used for their “boss,” the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. In order to study the real story of the character, Vargas Llosa, as he had done on so many other occasions for his novels, went to the physical, geographical space of the character—­in this case, the Dominican Republic—­and immersed himself in libraries, documents, papers, and magazines from the Trujillo era, steeping himself in the life and legend of the dictator. He was not content with this information and documentation: he interviewed hundreds of people who had known Trujillo, relatives who could speak about his life, his death and the mythology surrounding him. As was to be expected, he read, like an insatiable encyclopedist, everything that had been written about Trujillo both inside and outside the Dominican Republic. The result, La fiesta del Chivo, is an extraordinary narrative text that recalls the masterworks, La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral, of a younger Vargas Llosa. However, in La fiesta del Chivo, he would also make use of all the literary wisdom and life experience gained in the years since his youth, infusing this novel about Trujillo with an evident maturity. It is worth remembering that, before publishing La fiesta del Chivo, Vargas Llosa had become, in important media, critical, and journalistic circles, academic or otherwise, “hobbled” by his political experience, an experience that, in their view, had diminished the intellectual strength and literary energy he brought to his irrepressible urge to write. These “ninguneadores,” these naysayers, based their opinions on the very books he published in the nineties, the works that “did not rise to Vargas Llosa’s level,” or that were considered “inferior” both within and outside of the Spanish-­language literary world. For this reason, La fiesta del Chivo was a literary and editorial surprise. A surprise for both readers and critics. A beneficial surprise. In this novel, we see the best version of Vargas Llosa, the most intellectually, politically, and literarily mature, the Vargas Llosa so many had missed for ten years, the Vargas Llosa whom those critics and literary circles that pay more attention to political mania than to a life worthy of a novel  85

direct observation and a close reading of a writer’s text had rejected and given up for dead. This is what I want to say: with the writing and publication of La fiesta del Chivo in 2000, Vargas Llosa delivered a direct hit, in literary form, to all of his enemies and those who still doubted his immense literary talent and effort. With this book, which rang in a new century and new millennium, he gained thousands of readers all over the world. The novel is, at once, a pinnacle of Spanish-­language fiction and irrefutable proof that Vargas Llosa should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature fifteen years earlier. In any case, with La fiesta del Chivo, his literary excellence and intellectual talent came to claim the Nobel, and this reorganized and definitively oiled the writer’s intellectual machinery, demonstrating that he would not slacken his efforts to write the best novels in the world based on an event or local episode that had not been of central importance to everyone. A small world, a microcosm (Dominican Republic), an era of dictatorship, a dictator (Rafael Leónidas Trujillo), the absolute abuses and corruption of that absolute dictator, the backwardness of the time and other historical and parahistorical elements all appear in Vargas Llosa’s novel, woven together with fictional elements he invented ex novo. Through Vargas Llosa’s magisterial writing, through his exceptional use of the technique of converting journalistic and historical information into literary documentation, and through the use of narrative devices related to cinematographic methods, which, while not new in Vargas Llosa’s literature, were certainly renewed, the initial story of Trujillo, while still remaining a true story, became a novel. The Road to the Nobel

The creature of writing, however, is not content with the triumph occasioned by his most recent novel. Like a man possessed, like a recent convert, like a manic seized by writing and intellectual curiosity, Vargas Llosa, while receiving intellectual and academic recognition, remains bound by his self-­discipline as a writer; years pass, he makes friends and, of course, he continues to write novels. He becomes absorbed once again with an old 86 j.j. armas marcelo

project, a novel about Flora Tristán, an extraordinary figure, a feminist and utopian anarchist who sought absolute freedom throughout her life, and he discovers another singular, libertarian, utopian, brilliant character: Flora Tristán’s grandson, the great painter Paul Gauguin. The novel, titled paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise), was published in 2003, and it was his most devoted readers who discovered in its pages a “hidden essay” about utopian freedom based on the novel’s two central characters, the grandmother and the grandson, whose lives, in addition to being extraordinary, were also examples of privileging the struggle for freedom over many other vital concepts. While Vargas Llosa was traveling, receiving prizes and honorary doctorates from universities all over the world, giving talks, exploring places both known and unknown, he never stopped writing and publishing essays and articles that, later, he would compile into books that were then, and continue to be today, examples of intellectual professionalism, seriousness, and depth. His curiosity and energy unflagging, the creature of writing was walking slowly toward Stockholm, without this ever having been his expressed plan, as was the case, somewhat shamefully, with other writers who were his contemporaries. Without pause, he wrote what would soon become Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl, 2008). Vargas Llosa told me that the germ of that novel was seeing an old acquaintance of his in Japan’s Narita airport, luxuriously dressed and surrounded by the yakuza who were serving as her bodyguards at the time. The novel was met with both detractors and favorable reviews. It was not a mere diversion, as some claimed, and, though it may not be at the level of La fiesta del Chivo, it may still be seen as an example of the quality of Vargas Llosa’s more mature literature. During this period of comings and goings, in whatever part of the world where we happened to overlap, we would meet up and talk. Vargas Llosa told me that he was deeply involved in a project for a novel about another extraordinary figure: Roger Casement, a diplomat for Great Britain in the Congo of King Leopold, Joseph Conrad’s guide in the Congo (about which Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness), the real or fictitious author of the Black Diaries, the writer of a devastating report a life worthy of a novel  87

about the abuses of colonialism in the Congo and the rubber companies’ exploitation of the Putumayo in the Amazon. “It will take me a very long time, and it may be the last novel I write,” he told me over a drink—­Vargas Llosa isn’t a serious drinker; just wine with dinner and an occasional “social” whiskey—­in a bar in Stockholm, in the winter of 2007. The Nobel, he had told himself a thousand times, was a destiny that had rejected him. I am certain that, among the influential Swedish academics, there were one or two who had vetoed Vargas Llosa’s winning the Nobel, just as they had done to Jorge Luis Borges, who, unjustly, never received it. One of them, Artur Lunkvist (1906–­68) who, in his era, was influential and all-­powerful, I had met personally—­he seemed to me like a country bumpkin with borrowed and slightly outdated ideas. Lunkvist had won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1958; he was an armchair leftist, one of many in the literary world, and he was not keen on awarding the grand prize to one of the greatest universal novelists of the twentieth century. But Lunkvist died, and his time of influence ended. I was with Vargas Llosa in Stockholm—­a city Vargas Llosa did not favor greatly—­on three occasions: the first in 1977, for an International Congress of the pen Club, of which Vargas Llosa was president; a second trip in 2007, in order to participate in a conference on Vargas Llosa’s work and intellectual personality organized by Inger Enkvist and the Cervantes Institute in Stockholm. The Swedish press, on that occasion, repeated it over and over again: it was unbelievable that “a giant of world literature” such as Vargas Llosa had not been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. We spoke of Roger Casement again, of a planned trip to the Congo in order to learn, in situ, about the geography and the people he was going to write about (or was writing about) in the novel. This process, an almost “naturalist” approach, is typical of Vargas Llosa, and appears to be one of the greatest intellectual driving forces behind any of his literary projects: learn about the terrain, travel to the place, touch it, see the people, write reports about his travel experiences, immerse himself, clothe himself, intoxicate himself with the geography and the people he writes about, with the air they breathe, their suffering and their triumphs, their joy and their 88 j.j. armas marcelo

sadness, their lives and their deaths. We were talking about this “mania” as we walked along a street in Stockholm, and I told him that one day soon they would award him the Nobel. “I think it’s too late,” he replied. “It will happen, it will happen, you’ll see,” I told him. I was not trying to encourage him—­Vargas Llosa does not need encouragement—­and he especially did not need one of his closest friends to try to cheer him up so he would not be sad about not getting the Nobel. I said it to him, just as I had a few years before, because I was convinced that the day would come, sooner or later. On October 7, 2010, I was in Tenerife, in the city of La Laguna. I had spent a raucous night of drinking and laughing with two of my lifelong friends, Emilio Machado, a great painter, and Emilio Sánchez-­Ortiz, a great writer who was—­such a coincidence—­at that moment, occupying the same post as a writer for French radio that Vargas Llosa had occupied as a young man. At midnight I received a call on my cell phone. It was the painter Carlos Boix, a close friend of mine. “It’s Vargas Llosa! It’s Vargas Llosa!” he shouted, elated, from Madrid. “What about Mario?” I asked Boix, still half asleep. “It’s the Nobel, Juancho, the Nobel!” I whooped with joy, rejoicing along with so many other writers in the Spanish language who had admired Vargas Llosa for so many years, along with the hundreds of thousands of his readers shouting with jubilation from all around the world. A few months after Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel, the Spanish literary journal Turia published a monograph about him. Gathered there are the signatures of a different generation of writers, all but one being Latin Americans who surrendered to the evidence and expressed their admiration for Vargas Llosa’s literature: Rodrigo Fresán, Argentine; Jorge Benavides, Peruvian; Fernando Iwasaki, Peruvian; Eduardo Hadfon, Guatemalan; Alberto Fuguet, Chilean; Juan Carlos Méndez Guedez, Venezuelan; Gustavo Guerrero, Venezuelan; Edmundo Paz Soldán, Bolivian; Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Colombian; Héctor Abad Fasciolince, Colombian, and several others of equal relevance and renown. A generation of Latin American writers-­readers gave their public support for the Nobel, a life worthy of a novel  89

unambiguously, without misgivings, without any lingering bad aftertaste from their parents’ generation. In those pages, Alberto Fuguet explains in a brief but brilliant essay why Vargas Llosa is “his writer”: because he not only taught the newer generation to read and to write, but he also allowed them to follow in his footsteps with exceptional intellectual and personal generosity. I went to Stockholm, after I had read El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012), to attend the festivities that many friends from Spain, Peru, and the rest of the world were holding in Vargas Llosa’s honor in the wake of the Nobel. I had begged off from the solemn award ceremony—­I was traveling from Rome to Madrid and arriving in Stockholm the following day—­so I was not present when Vargas Llosa read his Nobel acceptance speech. But I did not miss any of the other Swedish celebrations, or the television programs on which Vargas Llosa appeared, or the impromptu parties in the Grand Hotel that went into the wee hours of the morning with champagne, friendship, and laughter. I also did not want to miss Vargas Llosa’s return to Lima. He had been invited by Juan Ossio, minister of culture under President Alan García, and I flew with him to Peru. I spoke publicly alongside Alonso Cueto, one of the most outstanding contemporary Latin American novelists; Efraín Kristal who, in my opinion, is the scholar who knows Vargas Llosa’s literary texts better than anyone; and David Gallagher, the Chilean critic, and one of the first to have read and believed in Vargas Llosa’s literature. Those two trips—­to Stockholm for Vargas Llosa to receive the Nobel and to Lima to be publicly celebrated—­were the culmination of a personal and literary destiny, hard fought and deservedly won through intellectual and political battles, ideological clashes and unremunerated articles, in university debates and journalistic disputes. The “hate office”—­as Vargas Llosa called it in El pez en el agua, which had its heyday during the Peruvian presidential campaign of 1990—­had, by now, disappeared or died. President Alan García, former personal enemy and political adversary, awarded Vargas Llosa a medal at the Casa de Pizarro in front of the entire country of Peru. They had to invent a new Peruvian medal for the 90 j.j. armas marcelo

occasion, because Vargas Llosa already had all the other ones. The life straight out of a novel that Vargas Llosa had, perhaps, dreamed of in early childhood, when he wanted to be a writer with all his heart and despite every obstacle, that life had become a reality. One phase was ending and, without pause, another was beginning. Vargas Llosa was a Nobel Prize winner. “Now you’ll allow yourself to take a vacation,” I told him as we were traveling to Lima. “No, no, I have to finish writing an article called ‘The Civilization of the Spectacle’ and then, right away, I need to start writing a novel that already has a title and takes place in Piura: El héroe discreto” (2013; The Discreet Hero, 2015). As I had expected, Vargas Llosa, the creature of writing, was moving forward with his head held high. He had not been subdued by the Nobel. His urgent need to keep writing the novels that he considered necessary had not subsided just because he had received the highest literary prize in the world. Note

Translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell.

a life worthy of a novel  91

chapter 6

Vargas Llosa and Cervantes Modern Knights

Alonso Cueto

In this chapter I would like to comment on the links between Vargas Llosa’s fiction and Cervantes’s Don Quixote de La Mancha. I am not going to talk about literary influences per se but about convergences between the nature of the characters and the situations in which they are placed by the authors. Based on what we know from his biography, Vargas Llosa had an early experience with Don Quixote even before reading it. In fact, in his memoir El pez en el agua (1993; A Fish in the Water, 1994) he talks about an episode of his youthful bohemian nights with Norwin Sánchez, editor in chief of the crime section of Última Hora, a Lima daily. Vargas Llosa recalls that by the third or fourth drink, Sánchez would begin to recite from Don Quixote, crying out right after, “What great prose, damn it all!” (1994, 142).1 In El pez en el agua he also remembers that the day he met Raúl Porras Barrenechea he went into his office and saw the walls covered with images of Quijotes and Sanchos. In that office filled with statuettes and posters of Don Quixote one can only assume that the great Peruvian historian spoke to his young disciple of nothing but the works of Cervantes (1994, 286). The Quixotic world was, as seen in these two juvenile brush strokes, a sign of what would later turn into his passion as a reader. The Spirit of Adventure

Just like Don Quixote, Vargas Llosa’s characters are audacious and driven by a particular form of morality. Dissatisfied rebels and dreamers, his 93

characters set out to transform the world or at least take a stand organizing some heroic resistance on behalf of their community. That is what Jaguar does in La ciudad y los perros (1962; The Time of the Hero, 1966) by creating a rebel student group known as the Circle as a means of opposing the oppressive system of the military academy. Likewise, in Conversación en La Catedral (1969;Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), Zavalita, just like a group of young revolutionaries, decides to confront General Odría’s dictatorship. Similarly, it is what Pantaleón Pantoja seeks when creating his utopia of order called “Pantyland.” In La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984), Conselheiro takes a stand when commanding his army of outcasts in order to confront the Republic; and in La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001), the conspirators stand firm when waiting for the arrival of Trujillo’s car on George Washington Avenue as the dictator heads for San Cristóbal the night of May 30, 1961. All of them confront the world. They seek to impose their own set of values and conventions on their reality fully aware of the foreseeable consequences. They proceed in this manner because otherwise they would be condemned to a nonexistence. Though Vargas Llosa’s characters are doomed, failure does not affect their identity as moral rebels. What ties things together in Vargas Llosa’s novels is the friction between the adventurous, idealist, and militant spirit of the characters and the banal, cruel reality that devours the certainty of their illusions. This is an essential meeting point between Vargas Llosa’s and Cervantes’s characters; they all lead a life at the service of an illusion until that illusion is confronted by the futile force of reality. Jaguar grows into an employee habituated to routine. Zavalita lives immersed in defeat in foggy Lima. Pantaleón is put to shame by the army for whom he created his utopic Pantyland. It is possible to ask, after reading these novels by Vargas Llosa, if these deeds have served any purpose—­and the answer is consistently positive. In his essay “Una novela para el siglo XXI” (2004; “A Novel for the Twenty-­First Century”), Vargas Llosa states that Don Quixote is a novel about fiction in which imaginary life is everywhere—­in unexpected events, in the words and even in the air characters breathe. This is a definition that 94  alonso cueto

could also be applied to Vargas Llosa’s works. Imaginary life is essential to all his characters, from Alberto who fabricates stories about his love life, to Fonchito who sees the enigmatic Edilberto Torres materialize in El héroe discreto (2013; The Discreet Hero, 2015). For Cervantes’s as well as for Vargas Llosa’s characters, imagination and fantasy function as shelters against the affronts of reality. Liberty’s Morality

For the characters in Don Quixote, as well as in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, the morality of each individual is the foundation of the epic sense of their lives. Loyalty to the Circle fostered by Jaguar, the religious defense supported by Conselheiro, the preservation of colonial art advocated by the lunatic in the drama El loco de los balcones (1993; The Madman of the Balconies), are all examples of turning to a moral authority. All of them project a type of behavior—­a deed—­but before going to the battlefield, they have raised a flag. And even though such conduct or deed is presented with numerous variants, the shared moral compass is the defense of freedom. This is what keeps Jaguar motivated to not be subdued by the military system. That is also what Zavalita longs for as he rebels against his father and the political system. Similarly, it is what drives the conspirators when facing Trujillo. In Vargas Llosa’s protagonists there is a private morality that challenges the public, one riddled with lies and hypocrisy. This individual morality is the foundation of their actions. Don Quixote does not relinquish his principles until the end, when he is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon—­that is, by the licenciado Sansón Carrasco. The same can be said about Jaguar, who keeps his principles intact until he becomes absorbed by routine, once out of the Circle—­that is to say, outside of utopian territory. When these rebels seek to free themselves from oppression, they create a space permeated by a utopian sense of freedom. Those who want to oppose freedom are the dictators, the systems, and the reality created by them. Again, in his essay “Una novela para el siglo XXI,” Vargas Llosa defines Don Quixote as “a novel about fiction” but also as “a hymn to freedom” vargas llosa and cervantes  95

(2004, xviii).2 He quotes the phrase where Don Quixote says to Sancho: “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts heaven gave to men; the treasures under the earth and beneath the sea cannot compare to it; for freedom, as well as for honor, one can and should risk one’s life, while captivity, on the other hand, is the greatest evil that can befall me” (Cervantes 2003, 2:832).3 Vargas Llosa adds that what lies at the core of this freedom is a profound mistrust of authority, of the outrages than can be committed when abusing power, all types of power (2004, xviii–­xix). In my view, Vargas Llosa’s novels are narrative explorations of freedom and its responses to the paradoxical evil of power. The concept of life that emanates from them is the presence of power as a natural drive in the lives of people. All his characters are either exercising or resisting power in one way or another. For Vargas Llosa, power, as well as the response of his protagonists—­rebelliousness—­are essential instincts. In a certain way, Don Quixote’s heroic deeds are also an exercise of power against the oppressions of reality. It should not be forgotten, on the other hand, that when Don Quixote persuades Sancho to accompany him, the knight promises the squire the governorship of an island, that is, the exercise of some kind of power. The Power of the Underdogs

In another passage of the essay “Una novela para el siglo XXI,” Vargas Llosa quotes from the episode in which Juan Haldudo, from Quintanar, is whipping Andrés, one of his servants, because he has lost a sheep, something Haldudo was entitled to do according to the laws of the time (2004, xx). However, Don Quixote rejects these laws by attempting to stop the punishment in the same fashion as when he freed twelve criminals, among them Ginés de Pasamonte, because, “it is not right for honorable men to prosecute other men who have not harmed them”(Cervantes 2003, 2:170).4 According to Vargas Llosa, this is due to Don Quixote’s limitless love for freedom: in a pinch, his deep distrust of authority wins out over the law of the land (2004, xxi). This praise from Vargas Llosa is not by chance. The incident about the liberation of the twelve criminals 96  alonso cueto

condemned to the galleys and the open challenge to the laws of the time in favor of the underdogs, could have inspired Vargas Llosa’s Conselheiro. Like Don Quixote, Conselheiro frees from misfortune and gives meaning to the lives of those who accompany him. Even though Ginés de Pa-​ samonte and his group are not characters in La guerra del fin del mundo, in this novel by the Peruvian author we find many underdogs: João Abade, wanted by the police, João Grande, who has murdered his stepmother, Pajeú, marked by a huge scar, María Quadrado, who has killed her son and has gone on a pilgrimage to Monte Santo. Among these underdogs we also find the short and hunchbacked León de Natuba. They are all criminals, losers, like Ginés de Pasamonte and the prisoners liberated by Don Quixote. The same can be said for Boas, Rulos, and Cava in La ciudad y los perros. They are underdogs of animal-­like aspect whom Jaguar sets free and to whom he gives identity as members of the Circle. Likewise, in Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), the work of the prostitutes acquires meaning through Pantaleón and his utopic Pantyland. They are all individuals outside the law and now free. Just as Don Quixote liberated the criminals, the liberation of these fictional characters by Vargas Llosa in his novels is a deed worthy of a knight errant. Knowingly, Vargas Llosa quotes a passage about Don Quixote’s stay in Barcelona (“Una novela,” 2004, xvii–­xviii). There his host, Don Antonio Moreno, takes “Don Quixote for a stroll around the city (with a sign placed on his back which identified him)” and a Castilian insults him: “You are a madman . . . [and] you have the attribute of turning everyone who deals with you or talks to you into madmen and fools” (Cervantes 2003, 2:867).5 Vargas Llosa adds: “The Castilian is right: Don Quixote’s madness—­his hunger for irreality—­is contagious and has spread around him the appetite for fiction which possesses him” (“Una novela,” 2004, xviii).6 The reason Don Quixote’s madness is contagious, as shown throughout the entire novel, is that it is a madness that grants dignity and meaning to lives that otherwise would not have them. This madness follows the same course when led by Pantaleón and Conselheiro. As with vargas llosa and cervantes  97

Don Quixote, Vargas Llosa’s characters could be accused by the Castilian man of being demented, and of driving mad and turning into fools the people around them. Excluding the Traitor

In the moral universe informing that madness, Don Quixote does not accept treachery, and neither do the heroes of Vargas Llosa. Fantasy not only has its morality; it also has a code of honor. And fantasy cannot and must not be betrayed. The figure of the traitor in Vargas Llosa’s work is essential from La ciudad y los perros to El héroe discreto, a novel where the father is betrayed by his sons. In the former, when Jaguar is accused by everyone of being an informer, he does not give up his private utopia—­that of keeping the rules of the rebel group. He does not give away Alberto. He does not change the rules, because there is nothing worse than being a snitch (“porque no hay nada peor que ser un soplón”). Vargas Llosa has often made reference to the informers sent by the government of Manuel A. Odría (1948–­50; 1950–­56) to the University of San Marcos, at the time when he was a student and an activist there. Hence, it is very likely that this aversion to traitors might have a biographical origin. If treachery is unacceptable, it is because there is always an enemy. If for Vargas Llosa, as well as for Cervantes, reality is made up of constant rivalry, it is because his heroes always sense the enemy nearby. Conselheiro is, like Don Quixote, a character who sees the Antichrist in his enemies, especially in the members of the Republic. He is a dreamer who thinks Republicans are going to reestablish slavery. He is seeing windmills and dragons from the end of the world, where there is an enemy state. If the enemy does not exist, the passion of the activist will invent one in order to become a rebel or escape from his adversaries. Words and Deeds

In Vargas Llosa’s novels the word has a moral meaning. Its use suggests an attitude of rebellion. It is not by chance that Don Quixote takes several days to look for a name for himself and for Rocinante, his horse. That is 98  alonso cueto

why we never know Jaguar’s real name, and why Alberto Fernández and Ricardo Arana are known as the Poet and the Slave in La ciudad y los perros. The visceral relationship between the hero and the word supposes the construction of an alternate reality to life as we know it. Don Quixote is a rebel against the world simply because he reads novels. Alberto the Poet writes letters even about realities he does not know. Don Quixote sets out to accomplish his mission in real life. Due to excessive love-­letter writing, Alberto falls in love with Teresa, without really knowing her. In a critical scene from La ciudad y los perros, Alberto refuses to write love letters on behalf of the Slave because he knows the letters are addressed to Teresa. Thus, the hero’s words, different from the institution’s, convey the truth. It is perhaps what Jaguar thinks in one of the final scenes of the novel, when he writes the letter in which he blames himself for the death of the Slave hoping to save Teniente Gamboa. Jaguar has discovered in him—­Gamboa—­a true friend, that is, someone who, like himself, has not renounced his principles. Gamboa is an officer, but also a rebel like him. Jaguar has written a letter incriminating himself. Language has purified him. Gamboa has trusted the army. He is a disillusioned Quixote. Incidentally, the word as an expression of a praiseworthy morality appears in Vargas Llosa’s essay on the chivalric romance Tirant lo Blanc (2008) when he praises the protagonists because they are verbal beings. All characters are filled with what he calls a type of “rhetorical effusions” (“efusiones retóricas”) (2008, 98). Don Quixote is a compulsive reader who seeks to extend the universe of fiction. Pedro Camacho in La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982) is a compelling fiction writer who loses touch with reality, a character akin to the nobleman from La Mancha, who also discovers that his stories merge with his life. Alberto the Poet, in La ciudad y los perros, is a compulsive writer who, in a passage of the novel, brags about being able to write many love letters in a short period of time. In chapter 6 of the novel, we read: “Bah! Alberto said. I could write ten love letters in an hour” (Time of the Hero, 2004, 135).7 The words Don Quixote reads and that Alberto writes are alike because what one reads and the vargas llosa and cervantes  99

other writes are far from reality. Through writing, Alberto re-­creates for his group a world he does not know: Alberto talked about Golden Toes as much as anyone else in the section. No one suspected that he knew about Huatica Street and its environs only by hearsay, because he repeated anecdotes he had been told and invented all kinds of lurid stories. But he could not overcome a certain inner discontent. The more he talked about sexual adventures to his friends, who either laughed or shamelessly thrust their hands into their pockets, the more certain he was that he would never go to bed with a woman except in his dreams, and this depressed him so much that he swore he would go to Huatica Street on his very next pass, even if he had to steal twenty soles, even if he got syphilis (Time of the Hero, 2004, 97–­98).8

For both Don Quixote and Alberto there is a compensatory aspect to fiction. Alberto, like Don Quixote, endures the unrequited love of which he writes in his letters. But when he meets Teresa, he stops writing. Fiction compensates for but is incapable of replacing reality. When Don Quixote cannot find his books, as the priest and barber have disposed of them, he decides to set out on his second outing. That is when he proposes that Sancho become his squire. The Poet Alberto, on the other hand, lives dissatisfied, unhappy with the love letters he writes. He wants to carry out a major deed. He falls in love with Teresa, betrays the Slave, feels guilty, and then the Slave dies. Subsequently, Alberto denounces the Circle. Alberto and Don Quixote want to make a transition from language to reality, from word to action. But both are penalized because of their words. The colonel brings up the letters and romance novels written by Alberto to chastise him. The priest and the barber blame words for the madness of the gentleman from La Mancha. Words are censored by law, by authority. In Vargas Llosa’s writing, with some exceptions, words are on the side of the rebels. Among the dissenters we find Zavalita, a journalist in Conversación en La Catedral, Alberto, the Poet from La ciudad y los perros, the translator Ricardo Somocurcio from Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl, 2007), and the scriptwriter Pedro Camacho from 100  alonso cueto

La tía Julia y el escribidor. All of them are Quixotic characters who live amid words. But the actions that destroy their words are on the side of the other protagonists. Jaguar as much as Cayo Bermúdez and the Bad Girl herself—­la “niña mala”—­as well as the reality of the story impose themselves on these rebels. Power feels uncomfortable when threatened by words. The priest and the barber who seek to dispose of Don Quixote’s books resemble the colonel, who as the principal of the military school, accuses Alberto of writing erotic novelettes in one of the final scenes of La ciudad y los perros. Alberto and Don Quixote are both blamed for their words—­the words they have read and written. Thus, it becomes evident that words are carriers of an ideal that reality destroys. In Travesuras de la niña mala, Somocurcio translates books from one language to another, but the Bad Girl goes further. She translates some lives into others; she transforms herself into women of different nationalities, languages, and appearances throughout the entire story. Just as Don Quixote does, when she returns to her own identity, when she gives up her multiple lives, she disappears. Her novel has reached the end. The Circles of Friendship

One of the fundamental themes in the works of both Vargas Llosa and Cervantes is the exploration of friendship. In Vargas Llosa, love relationships can be as difficult as in Don Quixote and the women as distant as Dulcinea. Teresa, in La ciudad y los perros, as well as the female protagonist in Travesuras de la niña mala, and Lucrecia in Elogio de la madrastra (1988; In Praise of the Stepmother, 1990) are distant women, who never fulfill the relationships with their partners. Male friendship and camaraderie, on the contrary, like that of Alberto and the Slave, or that of Lituma and Sergeant Silva, flourish and grow. This camaraderie is born in adversity, as when danger looms over friends as with Pantaleón in Pantaleón y las visitadoras and in Conversación en La Catedral with Zavalita’s friends, Aída and Jacobo. The theme of solidarity inherent in friendship is essential in Vargas Llosa’s works starting with La ciudad y los perros and its conception of the Circle vargas llosa and cervantes  101

as a group of friends who resist power. It is not by chance that Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844) was one of Vargas Llosa’s early favorites. In the conclusion to his essay on Don Quixote (“Una novela,” 2004, xxvi–­ xxvii), Vargas Llosa states that the friendship between Don Quixote and Sancho is the strange condition experienced between sleep and insomnia, the real and the ideal, life and death, the spirit and the flesh, fiction and life. Cervantes, according to Vargas Llosa, established dialogues between his two fundamental characters as components of their fellowship. He calls Sancho “brother,” for the utopia of chivalry is egalitarian. In a way, couples like Somocurcio and the Bad Girl mirror the relationship between the Quixotic ideal and reality as represented by Sancho Panza. Jaguar and the Bad Girl who, according to Efraín Kristal, is his heiress, remind the idealists Somocurcio and Alberto of the realities of love and time. Multiple Voices, Multiple Realities

In his essay on Don Quixote, Vargas Llosa wonders, “What is the image of Spain depicted on the pages of the Cervantine novel?” (“Una novela,” 2004, xxi).9 And he answers: “That of a vast and diverse world, without geographical borders, made of an archipelago of communities, small villages and towns, named ‘homelands’ by the characters” (2004, xxi–­x xii).10 He later explores the contribution of religion to Spain’s sense of cohesion: Throughout his three outings Don Quixote goes down La Mancha and parts of Aragon and Catalonia, but due to the origin of many characters and to the references to places and things in the course of the narrative and dialogues, Spain surfaces as a much more vast space, cohesive in its geographical and cultural diversity, and with uncertain frontiers that seem to be defined not in terms of territories and administrative demarcations but in religious terms: Spain ends in those indistinct and concretely maritime limits, where the moor’s territory begin, Spain’s religious enemy. (2004, xxii).11

This encompassing and unifying vision of the novel, which gathers characters from multiple geographies, ethnicities, and languages, is clearly 102  alonso cueto

another link that can be established between Don Quixote and Vargas Llosa’s works. His protagonists can be an Irish revolutionary who visits Congo and Putumayo, such as Roger Casement in El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012) or a pioneer of modern painting like Gauguin in El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise, 2004) who spends his childhood in Peru and ends up living in Tahiti. Peru itself, a multiethnic land, in his works is a vast and diverse country—­as represented in Vargas Llosa’s first novel in which a military academy brings together individuals from many different regions of the country. The mention of just one character, Paulino, from La ciudad y los perros, might suffice: he is a multifaceted mestizo with dual sexuality, and thus related to the gallery of ethnicities displayed by the cadets. In the novel, cadets come from all over Peru. This array of realities in the works of Cervantes and Vargas Llosa is accompanied by a variety of perspectives. A fundamental point where both authors meet is the relativity of truth and perspectives that emerges from their novels. In the works of both novelists there is a multiplicity of voices that feed the idea of the novel as a source of points of view and perspectives toward reality—­in other words, a universe of many experiences. The idea of the total novel in Vargas Llosa points in the same direction: numerous voices and points of view emanating from one single character. Parallel Stories

Even though Don Quixote has an obsessive, one-­track mentality, Cervantes is careful to remind us that the world, as well as language, is manifold. In Don Quixote the narrator transforms and opens the way to parallel stories; he minimizes his function by turning other characters into additional narrators. In Cervantes’s novel there is a series of stories emanating from the text, some of them considerably long, like the wonderful one about Marcela and Crisóstomo. Ever since his first novel, Vargas Llosa has preferred a method that is not entirely different from that of Cervantes. Right at the beginning of the story about the cadets at the military academy, Jaguar’s account opens in the first vargas llosa and cervantes  103

person, alternating, intervening, modifying the tone and the sense of time of the main story, and thus leading and nuancing it. The same can be said about the parallel stories of Fushía, Lituma and Don Anselmo, and in particular those in La tía Julia y el escribidor, whose radio serials we read like stories interpolated into the main text, although at times they become the main text itself. If Vargas Llosa’s characters can be defined as Quixotic knights who seek the ideal in a society that neglects it, it is because there is an essential relation between the beginning of the seventeenth century in which Cervantes wrote and the second half of the twentieth century, when Vargas Llosa began to produce his works. Both are periods that have witnessed the collapse of their foundations. They are times of disappointment. The imperial Spain of Cervantes and the political utopias of Latin America have become disappointments. The knightly ideal, which subordinates individual wills to a higher cause, has been replaced by the banality of the small, everyday story. That is why La ciudad y los perros (1963) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969) end with the destruction of their protagonists, the final defeat of any form of rebellion. But Vargas Llosa’s rebelliousness is not only against the institutions of the system but against reality itself. His ultimate challenge is against the limitations of reality, against the flow of time, against death. That is the obsession of the utopian fantasy Rigoberto endures with respect to his body: he wants to cover up the marks of old age in his looks. Vargas Llosa’s characters, like Don Quixote, could complain about living in a time that consumes us when our own fantasy wants to make us live in so many times and in so many bodies simultaneously. The answer to Rigoberto’s concerns is the Bad Girl. If Rigoberto possesses only one body, the Bad Girl displays multiple identities, as well as distinct and multiple bodies. Don Quixote enters a fictional universe where the time of the knights has ceased to exist. Vargas Llosa’s protagonists perform a similar maneuver. In the scriptwriter’s radio serials, just as in the community of Pantyland, time does not pass. Rigoberto also seeks to defeat time when he primps and tries to keep a youthful appearance in front of the mirror; and the Bad 104  alonso cueto

Girl seeks the same conquest of time as she embodies multiple women in one body. The rebelliousness of both is not against ordinary reality. It is against all of reality, reality in and of itself, the same rebelliousness we all feel today. In this sense, Don Quixote’s and Vargas Llosa’s protagonists are our accomplices and also our brothers and sisters. Notes

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

Translated from the Spanish by Ángel L. Estévez “¡Qué prosa grande, coño!” (1993, 286). “Al mismo tiempo que una novela sobre la ficción, el Quijote es un canto a la libertad.” “La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre; por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida, y, por el contrario, el cautiverio es el mayor mal que puede venir a los hombres” (Cervantes 2004, 2:984–­85). “No es bien que los hombres honrados sean verdugos de los otros hombres” (Cervantes 2004, 2:207). “está paseando a don Quijote por la ciudad (con un rótulo a la espalda que lo identifica) . . . ‘Tú eres loco . . . tienes propiedad de volver locos y mentecatos a cuantos te tratan y comunican’” (Cervantes 2004, 2:1025). “El castellano tiene razón: la locura de don Quijote—­su hambre de irrealidad—­es contagiosa y ha propagado en torno suyo el apetito de ficción que lo posee.” “Bah—­dice Alberto—­. Puedo escribir diez cartas de amor en una hora” (1962, 129). “Alberto era uno de los que más hablaba de la Pies Dorados en la sección. Nadie sospechaba que solo conocía de oídas el Jirón Huatica y sus contornos, porque él multiplicaba las anécdotas e inventaba toda clase de historias. Pero ello no lograba desalojar cierto desagrado íntimo de su espíritu; mientras más aventuras sexuales describía ante sus compañeros que reían o se metían la mano al bolsillo sin escrúpulos, más intensa era la certidumbre de que nunca estaría en un lecho con una mujer, salvo en sueños, y entonces se deprimía y se juraba que la próxima salida iría a Huatica, aunque tuviese que robar veinte soles, aunque le contagiaran una sífilis” (1962, 93–­94). vargas llosa and cervantes  105

9. “¿Cuál es la imagen de España que se levanta de las páginas de la novela cervantina?” 10. “La de un mundo vasto y diverso sin fronteras geográficas, constituido por un archipiélago de comunidades, aldeas y pueblos a los que los personajes dan el nombre de ‘patrias’.” 11. “A lo largo de sus tres salidas, el Quijote recorre La Mancha y parte de Aragón y Cataluña, pero por la procedencia de muchos personajes y referencias a lugares y cosas en el curso de la narración y de los diálogos, España aparece como un espacio mucho más vasto, cohesionado en su diversidad geográfica y cultural y de unas inciertas fronteras que parecen definirse en función no de territorios y demarcaciones administrativas, sino religiosas: España termina en aquellos límites vagos, y concretamente marinos, donde comienzan los dominios del moro, el enemigo religioso.” Selected Bibliography

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edición de la Real Academia Española y la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Santillana, 2004. —. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Vargas Llosa, Mario. Carta de batalla por “Tirant lo Blanc” [A defense of Tirant lo Blanc]. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2008. —. La ciudad y los perros. Barcelona: Seix-­Barral, 1962. Translated by Lysander Kemp as The Time of the Hero (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). —. Conversación en La Catedral. Madrid, Alfaguara, 1969. Translated by Gregory Rabassa as Conversation in the Cathedral (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). —. Elogio de la madrastra. Madrid: Tusquets, 1988. Translated by Helen Lane as In Praise of the Stepmother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). —. La fiesta del Chivo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Feast of the Goat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). —. La guerra del fin del mundo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1981. Translated by Helen Lane as The War of the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). —. El héroe discreto. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2013. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Discreet Hero (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). 106  alonso cueto

—. El loco de los balcones [The madman of the balconies]. Madrid: Seix Barral, 1993. —. “Una novela para el siglo XXI.” Introduction to Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, xiii–­x xviii. Edición de la Real Academia Española y la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Santillana, 2004. —. El paraíso en la otra esquina. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2003. Translated by Natasha Wimmer as The Way to Paradise (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). —. El pez en el agua. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1993. Translated by Helen Lane as A Fish in the Water (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). —. El sueño del celta. Madrid: Alfaguara. 2010. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Dream of the Celt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). —. La tía Julia y el escribidor. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977. Translated by Helen R. Lane as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). —. Travesuras de la niña mala. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Bad Girl (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

vargas llosa and cervantes  107

History, Authority, and Ideology

9. Carlos Franz lecturing at the Instituto Cervantes, one of the events of the 2016 Cátedra seminar. Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

chapter 7

A Poetics of Freedom Carlos Franz

There was, in my manner of being, in my individualism, in my growing vocation as an author, and in my unruly nature, a visceral incapacity to be that militant revolutionary, patient, untiring, docile. Mario Vargas Llosa, El pez en el agua (1993; A Fish in the Water, 1994)

Mario Vargas Llosa was a liberal even before he himself knew it. His adopting a liberal ideology was consistent with his earliest and most personal manner of perceiving and articulating the world. Long before postulating a politics of freedom, Vargas Llosa practiced a poetics of freedom. His first five novels cohere more with liberalism, which he was to discover later, than with the revolutionary Marxism and Sartrean engagement that he professed when he wrote them. This is what one expects from artists: that their ideas derive from their worldview. Not the reverse. I revisit here the early novels of Vargas Llosa and show how their characters coincide with liberal notions.1 I first read La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966) when I was sixteen years old, in Chile. I vividly remember the emotions it stirred within me. Like the characters in the novel, I was still in school. Mine was very different from Lima’s Leoncio Prado Military School. Mine was a private, elite school, although I am not sure how private (i.e., independent) any Chilean institution could be in 1975 under Pinochet. 111

What moved me was not the almost frightening similarities between those two very different institutes: at my school, there was also a Slave, one or two Jaguars, several cynical professors, and an idealist. Nor was it the similarities between Chile and Peru, their social differences, and their dominant machismo. What affected me most, to the point of depression, and making me shut the book, was the sense that those cadets’ defeat could have been my own. In the book’s epilogue, both the Poet and the Jaguar have been defeated. Their failures are only partial, because they have been affected relatively little by their school’s violence, they are still very young and have a life ahead of them, all of which, if only because of their youth, seems a kind of victory. But the illusions they had for themselves have been crushed. I felt a lump in my throat when I shut the book. Yet the novel’s ending was not entirely bitter. It offered me what I most desired then: the promise of an adult life, with its peculiar responsible freedom. From those partial failures there emanated, in exchange, a strong feeling of autonomy, a possible individual freedom not only for adventure, but also for assuming responsibility. An adult acceptance of our incapacity to fully understand a vast and chaotic world. A realization of the limits to which it is possible to transform history and change one’s own self without injuring more than healing. The Poet and the Jaguar are free to assume responsibility for their respective “mediocrity” (let us not avoid the word). I confirmed this feeling when I read Vargas Llosa’s two great works, La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975). These novels intensified the failure of their protagonists, as they are driven toward a limitation they accepted. It is a mediocrity imposed by higher and incomprehensible forces, but one chosen by the characters. It is an abatement of their absolute ideals; a moderation in their economic ambitions and their political radicalism; and a restraint in their own independence in order to respect and even demonstrate their preference for others’ freedom. It is also a self-­limitation chosen as a lesser evil and, frequently, even as an act of love or nobility. In order not to harm those we love and so 112 carlos franz

as not to cause more harm to the world, we achieve our dreams only partially (if that). The next two novels, from the 1970s, Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978) and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), surprised me as they did others, I assume, for their humorous tone and their politically incorrect abandon. It was as if the responsible and limited freedom of his previous characters had been the author’s paradoxical price of freedom, as he now satirized his earlier seriousness, even the seriousness with which he had approached his own work. Years later, when I read the liberal thinkers (Berlin, Popper, Hayek) that Vargas Llosa had studied starting at the end of the 1970s, I was surprised that the protests at the shift in his political stance did not take into account that this liberal worldview was already present—­in the shadows and sometimes even in full daylight—­in his first five novels. Those who attempted to separate Vargas Llosa’s works from his new ideas, seemed neither to have read his first works nor to have understood those that followed. They refused to accept the coherent realism of his dreams. This unawareness continues to surprise me. A Consistent Viewpoint

Vargas Llosa has told how, at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, he had read several liberal philosophers. He found in them a new ideology to replace the one that had fractured and finally fallen apart, along with his realization of the totalitarian nature of the Cuban Revolution and of socialist regimes in general. This historical disillusionment would lead him to revise his political ideas and to substitute them with others more consistent with his new world view.2 A key author he read was Karl Popper. As we know, The Open Society and Its Enemies ([1945] 2002) is an acerbic—­even vehement—­critique of Plato, whose political utopia, a perfect republic, yet without freedom (save to blindly follow the “philosopher kings”) would make him the father of totalitarian ideologues. It is also an audacious attack on Hegel a poetics of freedom  113

and Marx, as Plato’s followers. Popper warns that his monumental book may and even should be read as a “footnote” to his later book, The Poverty of Historicism ([1944] 1957). In it, Popper justifies his “logical” distrust of those philosophies that attempt to unravel history’s meaning and therefore are foolishly proud of predicting its course and their ability to change it. At the same time, The Poverty of Historicism followed on a previous reflection, his The Logic of Scientific Discovery ([1934] 1959). There, Popper reconsiders the old “Hume problem” that no natural law is absolute, since, although the laws are habitually binding, it is not impossible for an exception to emerge one day. Popper reasons that this epistemological uncertainty obliges the scientist to propose theories that are capable of being disproved (that may be “falsifiable”) instead of insisting on their being verified. This humility behind scientific reason—­which acknowledges the essential precariousness of its truth—­is the logical base of Popper’s later liberal thought. If we cannot ensure the absolute truth of a scientific law, even less can we state the truth of a “social law.” Law belongs to the legal field; beyond this, especially as applied to history, it is solely a metaphor. In his essay “Karl Popper, al día” (Karl Popper, updated), Vargas Llosa assumes his new teacher’s ideas: “In history, there are no ‘laws.’ History, for good or ill—­Popper and many others, including myself, believe the first—­is ‘free,’ a child of man’s freedom, and therefore, unmanageable, capable of the most extraordinary happenings” (1992, 28).3 Vargas Llosa is surprised by the coincidence between this notion of history and his beliefs as a novelist. Real history is a motley chaos that historians artificially order when they write about it, anxiously yet unsuccessfully wishing to give it meaning and predict its future. “Like two drops of water, Popper’s concept of written history resembles what I have always believed to be the novel: an arbitrary organization of human experience that protects one from the anguish caused by intuiting the world and life as a vast disorder” (1992, 28).4 Vargas Llosa found, in the historical disillusionments he experienced and in those readings, the similarity between his idea of the novel—­as an artifact that lends meaning to the unsolvable—­and those liberal notions: 114 carlos franz

real history as an irredeemable mystery. Before this, however, his attentive readers had already intuited something similar: such a way of understanding history—­personal and collective—­emerged, naturally and forcefully, from his first novels. A proof of the autonomous power of fiction that surprises its own creator; his characters expressed, even before the author himself, what he thought and desired. In effect, Vargas Llosa wished to free himself from the commitments that, from the start, politics imposed upon literature. Proof of this was his early estrangement from the Sartrean ideology that had meant so much to him in his naïve initial stages, when he was known by his friends as the “brave little Sartre.” “My second novel [La casa verde] did not reject ‘engagement,’ although it had been moved to the background by my increasing enthusiasm for the formal experimentation that, in the 1960s, was in the literary air in Paris and everywhere else” (“Contar historias,” 2004, 1:20).5 By adopting a liberal ideology, Vargas Llosa was consistent with his oldest and most personal approach to viewing and articulating the world. The novelist’s literary intuition and his realist poetics were ahead of his political reasoning. His earliest novels are more consistent with the liberalism he discovered afterward than with the revolutionary Marxism and Sartrean engagement that he professed when he wrote them. This is the consistency that one should ask from artists: that their ideas follow from their view. Not the reverse. A Realistic Freedom

Countering the common belief in artists’ idealism, good narrators are required by their profession to recognize reality so they may reinvent it. Vargas Llosa’s narrative realism was, from the start, not only a style but a manifestation of his common sense. It is from his precise understanding of literary realism—­as an artifact to represent the limited freedom that we call experience—­that he derives his suspicion of intellectual artifacts that attempt to supplant reality (freedom), instead of expressing it. I do not know if the engaged novelist of those years voiced at any time the Paris 1968 slogan “be realistic, demand the impossible.” However, in those early a poetics of freedom  115

novels, his eagerly revolutionary characters, the utopians who demand the impossible, quickly undergo personal and collective disaster. La ciudad y los perros ends with the idealist dogs’ defeat. And the realist city’s victory. The city “terrifies” the Poet and the Jaguar, the cowardly Romantic and the bold machista. Neither the Jaguar’s machismo nor the Poet’s sensitivity, both idealized stances, can manage the complexity of the world that awaits them. The Poet denounces the Jaguar because he believes the Jaguar had killed the Slave (and he torments himself thinking that he had not come to the Slave’s defense). He then contradicts himself, threatened by the officers who say they will expose his trafficking of pornographic stories. The Jaguar swears he did not kill the Slave and beats up the Poet, disfiguring him. Yet in the epilogue, we find out that the Jaguar lied: he had indeed assassinated the Slave, because the latter had informed on another cadet in exchange for a day pass—­a day pass from that hell where the Jaguar and his cohorts regularly humiliated him.6 When the Jaguar tries to confess, it is too late. The Poet returns to his bourgeois life and forsakes his lower-­class girlfriend, the one he had searched for during his school years so he could assimilate. As to the Jaguar, he searches out the same girl and marries her, abducting her in a romantic gesture typical of his clique, so different from the Poet’s boring bourgeois formula. The Jaguar, however, has also become bourgeois; the former thief now works in a bank and lives with his mother-­in-­law.7 His life is honest, tedious, probably happy. The implication—­but it is merely an implication, since the narrator’s Flaubertian neutrality is almost perfect—­is that life has rewarded the Jaguar’s savage, intuitive honesty. Yet his final meeting with Slim Higueras, his delinquent friend, does not let us—­or him, we suppose—­forget his past as a thief, abuser, and assassin. The Slave, undefended by the Poet and tortured by the Jaguar, is dead. Both the Poet and the Jaguar have paid the price for their maturity by abandoning their absolute idealism. For both, reaching adulthood signifies accepting a “realistic freedom,” one delimited by the world they have been given and by the weight of their first failures. 116 carlos franz

This kind of denouement, which leads the surviving characters to assume the responsibilities of a limited freedom, is repeated in Vargas Llosa’s next two novels. Their epilogues have been described as dark, pessimistic views of the world. Yet they are dark only from the perspective of utopian thought, adamant in considering an absolute failure anything less than an ideal victory. In fact, what is truly characteristic of the great tradition of narrative realism, especially of the Bildungsroman genre, is the transaction with reality that its characters must carry out at the end of their adventures. The heroes return home armed with the knowledge that permits them to accept and, from then on, to control the limits of their freedom. Vargas Llosa’s narrative realism, it seems to me, belongs to this genre. History as Confusion

La casa verde ends by bringing together the destinies of three main characters. The harpist Anselmo, Fushía, and Lituma all fail, albeit on different levels. Only a few women—­Lalita, La Chunga, and La Selvática—­achieve partial success, thanks to the good sense and pragmatism ascribed to them, in contrast to the excessive, unreal ambitions of the men. Fushía’s terrible end, in the Amazon leprosarium where only his compadre and buddy Aquilino visits him once a year, could be considered the novel’s most epic destiny. There is something undeniably symbolic in the criminal’s flight, which deceives his enemies and the law in order to remain free, even if half-­consumed by leprosy. This whining, human rag does not commit suicide or turn himself in. His ambition and violence have assured him a terrible destiny. However, what cannot be denied—­and is acknowledged by his best friend—­is that Fushía, step by step, has chosen this life. He has preferred absolute freedom to honesty, decency, or even love. How can the price for this radical freedom not be seen in his sores? Vargas Llosa has reminisced that this character is the one in his novel who most moved him. In La casa verde’s epilogue, Anselmo’s funeral is being arranged. Once an energetic entrepreneur, he ended up financially ruined, playing the harp a poetics of freedom  117

in the brothel re-­founded by his daughter, La Chunga. García, the priest, and Zevallos, the doctor, old witnesses of these entwined dramas, cannot settle on a meaning for the story of Anselmo’s love for Toñita, the blind-­ mute adolescent who ruined him. Was it something absurd, a perversion, or was it true love? The sole conclusion is that it is a mystery. The author seems to imply that it is better to accept and respect life’s mystery. The priest García, Anselmo’s bitter enemy, seems to think so when he agrees to celebrate the funeral mass for a man he had hated so much. If one of the narrative threads of this complicated novel reaches no visible conclusion, what can we expect from the knotted, tangled skein of the others? Human history—­individual and collective—­has no clear meaning. Or perhaps its tangle, its confusion, is also its clarity? We might go a bit further: in accepting that this confusion is irresolvable, we also accept a limited freedom to change it. I believe that this instinctive thought was already in Vargas Llosa’s poetics even before he himself formulated it in his politics. The Honor of Doubting

The beginning of Conversación en La Catedral can be linked to the ending of La ciudad y los perros. Zavalita is the mediocre journalist that the Poet might have become, ten or twelve years after he finishes military school, if the same things had happened to him that happened to Zavalita. The initial scene takes place in Lima’s city kennel. The mulatto Ambrosio beats the netted street dogs to death with a stick. The scene symbolically replays the taming of the “dogs” that had started at the Leoncio Prado Military School. The numbing of youth’s ideals and ambitions, beaten down by the city. In contrast to what is usually said of Peru, Zavalita’s infamous question—­“At what point did Peru become fucked?” (Obras, 2004, 2:33)8—­since it is, above all, a personal failure rather than a national one—­becomes “When did I become fucked?” The answers to these questions, necessarily imprecise and hypothetical, lead to other questions. For Zavalita, all turn on an intuition: I was fucked when I stopped being “pure” and I stopped being pure when I realized that I could no longer 118 carlos franz

believe. Zavalita wished to have faith in something, blindly, like most everyone believes, not asking questions, with no doubts. What stops him? His freedom of conscience. Zavalita bears the freedom of his conscience. Yet he does not renounce it. He has a critical awareness of himself, first of all. And then of the world that surrounds him (“At what point did Peru become fucked?”). He cannot believe in his family’s bourgeois values, just as he cannot believe in the authenticity of popular life (“In San Marcos, the cholos look terribly like the wealthy kids, Ambrosio” [Obras, 2004, 2:120]).9 He does not believe in the Communism of his friends at the university, or in the journalism that will be his profession, or in romantic love or honor—­except the honor of doubting. His lack of faith is not a result of any particular disillusionment (he will have many), it is a way of being, his inherent tendency to search for the false side of what seems truthful. It follows from his intuition that bad explanations are those that explain too much. The usual interpretation given the novel is that Zavalita is an example of bad conscience in the Sartrean sense. He is a guilt-­ridden bourgeois who can never stop being one. Possibly, Vargas Llosa himself believed this about his character when he created him. However, Zavalita is closer to a freethinker than a guilt-­ridden bourgeois: his approach is more realistic than neurotic. Zavalita professes his freedom of conscience by means of the painful realism that he refuses to renounce. It is more realistic to acknowledge that we do not know, rather than to believe in something false solely to protect us from the unknown. In politics, Vargas Llosa would discover this realistic approach only subsequently. It is tempting to think that the character taught this to his author. Unlike a novel of denunciation, Conversación en La Catedral not only paints a gray portrait of the Odría dictatorship, it also tarnishes the young revolutionaries and mature rebels. The protagonists’ mediocrity is confirmed through their voices, heard as a chorus in the novel. A morally lead-­gray “coloratura” like Lima’s fog, marked by Zavalita’s constant doubts. “What was worse, Ambrosio, was to have doubts, and what was marvelous was being able to close your eyes and say that a poetics of freedom  119

God exists, or say that God doesn’t exist, and believe it” (Obras, 2004, 2:129).10 But Zavalita cannot close his eyes. To his anxieties about spiritual and intellectual certainty, he opposes and prefers the honesty of his own doubts. He prefers gray, because the great darkness and light that alternatively blind and dazzle him injure him more than that in-­ between midway hue. If he refuses to join the Communist faction as all his group and even the young girl he loves have done, it is because he values his freedom to doubt more than the surety of belief. In his attitude is implicit the intuition that social history is not predictable, for the same reasons that he finds his own history surprising and ungovernable even by him. “What happens is that I did not even decide it [marriage]. It was imposed upon me, by itself, like work, like everything that’s happened to me. I have not done anything for myself. Instead, they have made me” (Obras, 2004, 2:514).11 Coincidence rules the world at least as much as the will. Both forces form an infinitely complex framework that nobody can break down in its entirety, and so it is destructive to try to totally control it. A Poetics of Freedom

La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral—­these first three novels can be interpreted in many ways, but one is quite obvious: they do not represent the ideology that their author publicly professed in the 1960s when he wrote and published them. During that decade, Mario Vargas Llosa defined himself as a Marxist and Sartrean. As an ideological Marxist—­not a militant—­he adhered to a global interpretation of the world, capable of announcing and even changing the course of history. As a Sartrean, he believed that the engaged writer could decisively contribute to this change. These novels, however, belied their author. While their graphic realism alerts us to the injustices they depict, this same device prohibits any univocal interpretation of their causes, solutions, or ways out. The graphic portrayals of the inequities and alienation of social and political life in Peru, and by extension, in Latin America, could be taken—­on the 120 carlos franz

surface—­as a political denouncement. However, the choral structure of these novels, which balances and equalizes the destiny of the just with that of the unjust, counters this kind of engagement, subordinating it to a poetics of individual freedom. Vargas Llosa’s typical narrative structure during that period alternates between a duet of viewpoints and a grand chorus of narrators. Whether as a duo or in a chorus, personally or represented by a polyphonic narrator, the protagonists offer different versions of their experiences and of the social history they are living. While their interwoven voices harmonize aesthetically, they contradict each other and often come to an ethical stalemate. The author’s neutrality equalizes them; any value judgment is left to the reader’s discretion. Each novel’s beginning in medias res throws us into the action unprepared. The argument does not advance linearly. It jumps and zigzags unpredictably; at one point it stops, then it backs up or goes around in circles, or jumps unexpectedly into the future. This vertigo reproduces a sense of chaos and inexactness of real time. We never learn about the characters’ motives and the causes that compel them until later, in the long run, incompletely, when it is too late. Just as life and history are used to treating us. This method also coincides with—­and anticipates—­Popper’s ideas in The Poverty of Historicism: “The essence of a man—­his personality—­can only be known as it unfolds itself in his biography” (2002, 30). Before he postulated a politics of freedom, Mario Vargas Llosa practiced a poetics of freedom. This aesthetics, articulated very early on, is decidedly anti-­utopian—­even when its author professed an almost fierce utopianism. The mechanics of his poetics—­the shifts (mudas), communicating vessels (vasos comunicantes), Chinese boxes, telescopic dialogues—­testify to that chaotic universe that, as such, would be dishonest and inexact to represent by means of a linear and unifying discourse. This poetics coincides, avant la lettre, with Popper’s notion of reformism or fragmentary social engineering. In this also, Vargas Llosa was a liberal before recognizing himself as one. The “total novel” (novela total) to which Vargas Llosa sometimes aspires, is the only acceptable totalitarianism, since it is fictional. This a poetics of freedom  121

“total novel” resembles a gigantic collage more than a single, cosmically unique image. If the novel competes with it, it does so not in unity but in dispersal, in incoherence, in constant fluidity. One of the method’s joyous mysteries is the contrast between the novel’s engineering and its apparent improvisation. Ricardo Cayuela has noted that “the almost mathematical architectonic concept of [Vargas Llosa’s] novels is not perceived as such by the reader” (2008, 25).12 By means of this engineering, which looks like improvisation, the Peruvian writer achieves the realistic representation of a psychological conflict. Order is the mind’s perpetually unsatisfied aspiration, a glass always spilling over due to the self-­same disarray of existence. The more disarray, the more freedom, and the more nostalgia for a form that can be put into order, without killing the aspiration. The fictions’ autonomy—­key to this poetics—­presumes the characters’ nostalgic freedom. This allows us a simple analogy: fiction should be as autonomous as the individual in a free society. The novels must give their characters independence so they can contradict themselves and each other. The characters’ rights take precedence over those of the author, who represents power and therefore, must control himself and be controlled (by the reader). The novelist is conceived as the narrative’s mediator and not as its leader. Like the citizen who, as a taxpayer, can be considered the State’s “owner” and not vice versa, the reader is the novel’s true owner. While Vargas Llosa’s novels describe a perverse world that should change, the author’s neutrality (one almost “managerial”) is such that an attentive reader will recognize that the characters have, in great measure, themselves adopted the life they lead; or at least their own way of carrying out their destiny. Neither the Poet, nor Zavalita, nor Lituma—­nor the readers—­would willingly tolerate an all-­powerful author who changes the way these characters choose to make mistakes. Their rebellion has been, before anything else, against the powers that think they know more than the characters what is best for them. The right to grow fond of mediocrity and even of poverty, both freely selected, is one of the most powerful intuitions conveyed in these novels. 122 carlos franz

This revulsion against interventionism, even when there are profound ethical contradictions still unresolved, did not fit well with the revolutionary writer. No matter how forced the novels’ interpretation, their aesthetics contradict an implicit directive or “centralism” that adheres to the agenda of an “engaged writer.” Instead, this aesthetic testifies to a constant and consistent preference for the individual liberty of its imagined beings. And, we can assume, it also demonstrates a preference for the liberty of real human beings. An Objection

In his essay “Karl Popper, al día,” Vargas Llosa affirms—­let us reiterate—­ that the novel is “an arbitrary organization of human experience that protects one from the anguish caused by intuiting the world and life as a vast disorder.” He adds further on: “The fear of acknowledging their condition as free beings has not only created tyrants . . . it has also created great novels” (1992, 28).13 It is not prohibited to disagree with Vargas Llosa. I do not believe that good novels “protect” us from the vast disorder of the world, nor are they the result of fear. On the contrary, they valiantly confront the arbitrariness of the real. Of course, there are “defensive novels” that protect us from reality or allow us to elude it. But these are not great novels. And, of course, Vargas Llosa’s major novels are not of this ilk. Besides, the notion of the novel as an artificial organization that protects us from real chaos contradicts that other notion that Vargas Llosa often postulates: the reading of fiction makes us freer. One or the other: if the novel “protects us from the vast disorder of the world,” then it would be similar to the “written history” rejected by Popper: an artificially regulated territory where we reconquer the security of an archaic past when we were not individuals but tribes (the time of El Hablador, 1987 [The Storyteller, 1989]). In this case, however, the novel would not liberate us. It would “save” us from freedom. If the novel is to make us freer, it will do so by representing to us the anarchical and unpredictable world in which we live. A representation that the majority of other narratives—­religious, a poetics of freedom  123

historical, ideological, cultural—­tend to shun. Thus, the novel will not “protect” us but will encourage us to confront the arbitrariness of the material and cultural universe. Yes, the reading of fiction liberates us. Yet this Vargasllosian conviction agrees more with courage than with fear. Since liberty always implies risk, only the narratives that put us at risk of confronting the incoherence of the real make us freer. In contrast, bad fiction—­and “historicist” narratives—­ saves us that trouble by organizing for us a world that in real life is always a labyrinth. The possibility of “living” other lives, which Vargas Llosa adds as fiction’s great attraction, is only liberating when those alternative lives stop protecting our routine, shielded lives and allow us to expand our awareness and experiences. To live other lives through the imagination lifts that “veil of Maya” generated by social conventions and routines that, according to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, protect us from passion and Dionysian disorder. There is no need to mention that in good novels we find a subtle combination of defensive arbitrariness and a courageous representation of the arbitrary. Good storytellers are like good magicians: they have us glance away with one hand, while with another, they work their trick in front of our eyes. With one hand, good magicians draw an order that entertains and comforts us, while revealing with the other the mystery that makes us tremble. The narrow distance between their hands gives us the measure of the risks they take, of their courage and ability. Bad magicians conceal themselves in a cloud of smoke (or ink). What an excellent narrative best represents is the adventure of freedom. A great novel is not another manifestation of Popperian “historicism.” It is not an order, but the possibility, which we rarely give into, of consciously living the disorder of existence as the price for being free. A Rebellious Humor

Vargas Llosa’s first three novels suggested that the young author was a liberal without realizing it, someone who practiced a poetics of freedom before formulating a politics of freedom. His next two novels, published 124 carlos franz

during the 1970s, Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor, would double the author’s instinctive bet on social and individual freedom against closed consciences and societies. He did this by means of a new tool: a rebellious humor antithetical to the Marxist and Sartrean seriousness that the author still professed. Both novels reveal an irrepressible creative rebelliousness, one that bursts with joyful laughter in the solemn presence of utopian thoughts that would want to delimit and direct it. Pantaleón entails a comic but effective tribute to the individual initiative against state bureaucracy. La tía Julia ridicules the very status of the author who dreams of being a deity and a social force in his time. Captain Pantaleón Pantoja receives orders to move to the Amazon in order to inaugurate a service of “visitors,” prostitutes who will attend to the distant forest garrisons. The recruits, stationed there for long periods, harass the few local women, provoking dangerous conflicts, even threatening national security. Pantoja must inaugurate this auxiliary service to the armed forces in secret, outside regular operations. His own family must not know what he is up to, and he is even forced to give up his adored uniform. The most brilliant officer of the Peruvian army’s Quartermaster Corps thus soon becomes a private entrepreneur. Or, to be more precise, he becomes something like an executive of an independent state enterprise, with public (but secret) funds, and under private management. In a short while, Pantaleón transmutes this crazy experiment into a model business. At the same time, he discovers in himself qualities of entrepreneurship that were awaiting only his relative independence to reveal themselves. His buoyant enterprise not only provides the needed sexual offerings, it creates an anxious new demand. As with all flourishing businesses, his problem is no longer finding or reaching out to clients; his challenge will be how to increase the pace of the unceasing demand that his success is generating. The first prostitutes—­“Busty,” “Bushy,” the “Brazilian,” and another dozen more—­no longer suffice. All the Amazon whores want to sign up; all the soldiers and many civilians want to enjoy their services. The visitors will increase to twenty, then forty, and then fifty. One of them, Maclovia, sums up the new business’s attraction: “The a poetics of freedom  125

peace we have from knowing that the work is legal, not living in fear of the police, that the cops won’t jump on us and take in a minute what we make in a month. . . . Even the pimps were quiet” (Obras, 2004, 2:792).14 Pantoja’s success is not only based on his qualities as a good administrator (so exceptional, his friends called him “the Einstein of fucking”). Its key is the liberal recipe, par excellence, for criminal markets: legalize them. In this case, legalize prostitution. By organizing a corps of prostitutes for the army, Captain Pantaleón Pantoja brings out into the open a submerged economy beleaguered by violence and injustice, substituting it for one which regulates—­and protects—­the offer and demand of these services. He even creates a special tender, the chips with which the soldiers pay these services are negotiable and are transformed into a new currency. By legalizing the informal market of prostitution, and converting it into a legitimate business, Pantaleón reaps the unanimous satisfaction of clients and prostitutes. And the sworn hatred of the business’s previous “entrepreneurs.” The pimps and their protectors (police, inspectors, and municipal employees) that lived off prostitution’s illegality, exploiting the weakest and most unprotected link in this invisible commerce—­the whores—­ revolt against a legalization that cancels their privileges and makes them irrelevant intermediaries. But the pimps are not the only ones who lose their job. The owners of the “moral economy,” whose business depends on the prohibitions of free sexual commerce, lose their influence when Pantoja’s business prospers. An entire guild of priests, yellow journalists, cynical politicians, religious and secular sanctimonious women, see their vocal privileges and social prestige threatened, thanks to the revolution that is taking place in the Amazon sexual market. Halfway through the novel, Pantaleón finds himself in predictably serious problems. His army patrons start to reconsider. “Damn. This mess is getting worrisome,” General “Tiger” Collazos must admit. The troop’s desire to be sexually satisfied threatens to liberalize the mores of all Amazonia, maybe of all Peru! Not for nothing, as this is Captain Pantoja’s feverish ambition. After its first year, the enterprise of this “Einstein of fucking” shows a spectacular balance sheet: “a total of 62,160 126 carlos franz

benefits15 . . . a figure that, while much lower than the demand, proves that at all times, the Service utilized its operating potential to its maximum yield—­the supreme ambition of all productive enterprises” (Obras, 2004, 2:756).16 Such a business success is seen as a contagious temptation and a national challenge. How can one liberate sex in a particular sector of the country without liberating, on the rebound and by chain reaction, all society and its economy? The absurd comic turn that gives the novel its dramatic appeal emanated from the experiment’s contradictory origins. It is the army, a hierarchical state institution, and by definition an enemy of any free initiative, that unthinkingly embarks on a morally and economically liberalizing enterprise. The rigid military bureaucracy is the perfect foil for the explosion of individual freedoms that the effort to legalize sexual commerce brings with it. Politically incorrect, Pantaleón y las visitadoras confirms that economic liberalization foments the liberalization of customs. By legalizing his prostitutes, dignifying their labor, and giving them fair wages and a security they had never known, Captain Pantoja frees them in no small measure from their servitude. Some of them reach the exciting conclusion that, although they are whores, they own their business and are their own masters. And to the machismo that not only used them, but possessed them, this is unforgivable. In Pantaleón, machismo represents, for sex, what the state represents for politics and economics: the compulsion to intervene, restrict, and control by force desire’s freedom. If machismo is contagious behavior, made worse by gangs, nationalism is machismo’s massive and political form. The whores’ liberation devolves into a national problem. The army finally realizes its great mistake. Liberating sex workers challenges machismo, represented by the armed forces in its broadest form: the nation. Pantoja is punished by his removal from the feverish atmosphere of the jungle and his dispatch to the frigid heights of the province of Puno. Under the guise of a comic novel, Pantaleón y las visitadoras extols individual initiative and entrepreneurial creativity as agents of change in a closed, hierarchical society paralyzed by the fear of freedom. a poetics of freedom  127

Ridiculous Dandies

If Pantaleón entailed a joyous celebration of the entrepreneurial initiative, impossible to reconcile with Marxism—­even a heterodox Marxism—­ La tía Julia y el escribidor will question the Sartrean author’s agency, his conceit, and social significance. And even the literary paradigm as utopia, that is, as an alternative truth. La tía Julia interweaves its autobiographical chapters with radio-­theater episodes written by the soap opera writer Pedro Camacho, a character in the autobiography. In the autobiographical chapters, Vargas Llosa recalls his first endeavors as a writer, in 1950s Lima, and his love affair with a woman ten years his senior, who is, besides, his aunt-­in-­law. That novelized memoir rivals in melodramatic tenor Camacho’s fictitious radio soap operas. In certain ways, real life surpasses the absurdities of radio theater. To mix real with fictitious melodrama encourages laughter and its subsequent catharsis. Vargas Llosa’s father threatens to punish his son because of the family scandal and his son’s disobedience: “I’ll kill you with five shots like a dog, in the middle of the street” (Obras, 2004, 2:1216).17 The memory of a real trauma, read back-­to-­back with one of Pedro Camacho’s hilarious scripts, soothes the wounded memory, exposing it as a version of the past whose meaning changes according to the context in which we place it. La tía Julia involves a critique of the “definitive” versions of reality. The supposedly more truthful narrative—­the autobiographical—­intermingles with the more mendacious melodrama. From the first mix (the story of Dr. Quinteros and his incestuous nephews), we are led to believe that both narratives are equally true or false (incest is also Tía Julia’s “symbolic sin”). The effect is to equate memory and fiction as forms of literature. All reality, when narrated, becomes fiction. To equate memory with melodrama produces an effect similar to the cult of literature elevated to a ministry. The serious, valiant efforts by a very young Vargas Llosa to become a writer—­at eighteen years of age, at the time—­coexist with the no less serious, valiant efforts by Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter. In fact, some of the stories that the aspiring writer drafts and then tears up are more improbable, ridiculous, and corny than the radio 128 carlos franz

dramatist’s far-­fetched scripts. It is not that the rookie’s juvenile experience and the ineptness of the two-­bit scriptwriter produce the same kind of results. Their similarity is more substantial: the seriousness with which each of them cultivates his vocation. For Camacho is no mercenary. He believes blindly in his work’s profound transcendence. His stories are art, and art exalts its creator and its recipient. Therefore, Camacho believes, the writer-­artist should devote himself in body and soul, like he does, to his work. Live for art, so life can be transformed into art. Varguitas, the post-­adolescent writer-­to-­be, feels the same way. Although he does not approve of Camacho’s improbable and corny narratives, he admires his austere dedication and driving will to write. Varguitas reproaches Camacho’s aesthetics, but he admires his ethics. He feels that Camacho is like a brother-­writer who, through another route, is also searching for literature’s holy grail. “In no way did I want to be only a part-­time writer, by the hour, but a real one, but like who? The closest one to a full-­time writer, obsessed and passionate about his vocation, that I knew, was the Bolivian radio-­novelist: that’s why he fascinated me so.” (Obras, 2004, 2:1073).18 La tía Julia puts into question literature’s seriousness, when it takes itself too seriously. Therefore, it parodies the writer’s illusions regarding the kind of power that fiction may have over society. Camacho and Varguitas are extremely serious about literature, Camacho because he is crazy, and Varguitas, because he is young. In this novel, Vargas Llosa recalls—­with early but implacable maturity—­the rookie’s fanaticism that not only defended his literary dogmas, but by censoring and forbidding, sought to impose them on others. Here is little Mario teaching his aunt Julia what she should not read: “He had established an Inquisitorial censorship on her readings, forbidding her all her favorite authors, beginning with Frank Yerby and ending with Corín Tellado” (Obras, 2004, 2:1104).19 His mockery of the exaggerated claims of high and low literature suggests that toward the end of the 1970s Vargas Llosa no longer believes fiction to be as transcendent or sacred as the young Varguitas and Camacho the scriptwriter believed. While the literary gaze is still a force in the world, a poetics of freedom  129

it is not superior to other perspectives or reasons. It can be complementary and perhaps illuminating. However, the writer who overvalues it is a ridiculous dandy. Thus, La tía Julia insinuates a revision of the literary models that, until then, were most dear to Vargas Llosa: Sartre as critic and Flaubert as narrator. One can see Pedro Camacho as a caricature of Flaubert. Both share a religious dedication to art and a grandiloquence about its redemptive possibilities, together with a characteristic, almost pathological, disdain for the real human species. Camacho who—­we can say this in all certainty—­ has never read Flaubert, shares with him some of his obsessions, such as dressing up as one of his characters or surrounding himself with items that allude to his fiction. “What is realism, gentlemen, the realism everybody talks about, what is it? What better way to create realistic art than to identify one’s self materially with reality?” (Continuing the joke, let us allow the reader to decide who actually said this: Flaubert or Camacho?) As to Sartre, in the mid-­1970s, the “brave little Sartre,” as Vargas Llosa was called, is headed toward an alarming revisionism. The engaged Sartrean writer, with his Mandarin airs and ambitions of social conscience, is a likely avatar of the pretentious writer of high or low literature, young or old, ridiculed in La tía Julia. Vargas Llosa keeps this avatar in check through laughter. The writer’s Sartrean engagement is invalidated by the comical critique of a literature that is “too serious.” The creator has intuited, before the intellectual, the incompatibility of the Sartrean engagement with the poetics of freedom and the liberal ideology to which he will soon subscribe. A Falsifiable Fiction

José Miguel Oviedo affirms that both Pantaleón and La tía Julia represent a “parodic view of the writerly activity.” They thus evince “what is crucial for the realist narrator: the difficulty (or impossibility) of writing novels that do not alter the very reality to which they wish to remain faithful” (“La transición clave,” 2004, 2:20).20 This “difficulty” is even more profound than an “impossibility.” Not only because Vargas Llosa would have 130 carlos franz

encountered, by the mid-­1970s, the difficulties of representation that adhere to realistic narration. These he probably recognized from the beginning. More likely, it is because, in the process, his novelist’s intuition had already reached the conclusion that, as an intellectual, his reason would later discover: an exact or definitive representation of reality is not possible or even desirable, because it infringes upon reality’s own unyielding and biased nature. Like his initial trilogy, then, these two novels reveal Vargas Llosa’s latent liberal sensitivities. Twenty years later, Vargas Llosa would clearly acknowledge this, when he states of Pantaleón: “As incredible as it may seem, as perverted as I was by the Sartrean version of engagement theory, at first I attempted to tell it as a serious story. I discovered that it was impossible, that it demanded ridicule and laughter. It was a liberating experience” (Obras, 2004, 2:633).21 This laughter results in a new premise. The premises of fiction—­like those of science, for Popper—­are created to be falsified instead of verified. The laughter underscores literature’s essential falsifiability and relates it to the best of scientific approaches. One license of fiction is that it even goes further than science: not only is it willing to be falsified, but it declares itself unverifiable. Here, paradoxically, is where its power resides. Literature’s greatest strength in social life comes from sincerely declaring its falseness. This honesty distinguishes it from alternative narratives—­ history, politics, economics—­that aspire to definitive truths, to complete and global answers. Narrative is not truth. It is not even one truth among others. It is not about an alternative truthfulness; it is about a powerful lie. Its effects, such as diversion and play, are very important. Its major contribution, however, is to emphasize that all other truths are either provisional or are also fiction, stories, and lies. Every truth that aspires to be absolute and eternal is a fiction: it belongs to the domain of literature more than to science. It is to this other literature, one “that dares not speak its name,” that religious truths belong when they attempt to nullify the mysteries of the world. Fiction highlights the inherent uncertainty—­empirical and intellect-​ ual—­of human experience. It is true, as Vargas Llosa states, that by doing a poetics of freedom  131

so, narrative enhances our nonconformity. But that is where literature’s enormous power to liberate begins and ends. Its power does not need to increase through an assumed ability to change or improve reality. It does not propose that we replace this uncertain world with an improved version known only to some enlightened writers. Good literature goes one better: it reinforces our suspicions about total explanations that forget the essentially provisional nature of our certainties. Therefore, it vaccinates us against truths that are too sure of themselves. Fiction liberates, yes, but it does so by compelling us to disbelieve the most established dogmas. In this way, it teaches us that there is no truth so sacred that it cannot be reinvented. Vargas Llosa’s first five novels demonstrate a liberal sensitivity more powerful than the ideologies he then espoused. La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral all express a clear poetics of freedom that contradicts historical determinisms. The next two, Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor, place in doubt the paradigms and dogmas of his youth—­his Marxist and Sartrean beliefs—­to seek instead full intellectual autonomy. In doing so, Vargas Llosa also curbs his own authority—­the author’s auctoritas—­to pursue the concept that there are no untouchable truths, not even his own. The dogmatic Varguitas was already sufficiently mature to see in himself the liberal Vargas Llosa. Notes

Translated from the Spanish by Anne J. Cruz. 1. In this essay, the expressions “liberal” and “liberalism” are used in their traditional European meaning (that is, in opposition to conservatism) and without the meaning they now have in the United States. This latter sense of “liberalism,” also labeled “social liberalism,” is closer to leftist ideas and does not correspond to Mario Vargas Llosa’s liberal position, which is generally considered as leaning to the right. 2. This quest for new ideologies had a precedent: after Vargas Llosa’s initial Communist leanings of the fifties, there followed a brief, but significant period of militant participation in the Christian Democrat party. 3. “en la historia no existen ‘leyes.’ Ella es, para bien y para mal—­Popper y muchos creemos lo primero—­‘libre,’ hija de la libertad de los hombres, y, por lo tanto, 132 carlos franz

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

incontrolable, capaz de las más extraordinarias ocurrencias.” Page numbers refer to the Spanish editions. “La concepción de la historia escrita que tiene Popper se parece como dos gotas de agua a lo que siempre he creído es la novela: una organización arbitraria de la experiencia humana que defiende a los hombres contra la angustia que les produce intuir el mundo, la vida, como un vasto desorden.” “Mi segunda novela [La casa verde] no había renunciado al ‘compromiso’ pero éste había sido desplazado a un segundo plano, debido a ese creciente entusiasmo por la experimentación formal que estaba en el aire literario de los años sesenta en París y en todas partes.” All quotations from the novels are from the Obras completas (2004). However, Vargas Llosa, consistent with his realist imprecision, has often declared “not being so sure” that the Jaguar killed the Slave. To be exact, with his wife’s aunt. “¿En qué momento se había jodido el Perú?” “En San Marcos, los cholos se parecían horriblemente a los niñitos bien, Ambrosio.” “Lo peor era tener dudas, Ambrosio, y lo maravilloso poder cerrar los ojos y decir Dios existe, o Dios no existe, y creerlo.” “Lo que pasa es que ni eso [el matrimonio] lo decidí yo. Se me impuso solo, como el trabajo, como todas las cosas que me han pasado. No las he hecho por mí. Ellas me hicieron a mí, más bien.” “La casi matemática concepción arquitectónica de sus novelas . . . no es perci-​ bida como tal por el lector.” “una organización arbitraria de la experiencia humana que defiende a los hombres contra la angustia que les produce intuir el mundo, la vida, como un vasto desorden.” Y más adelante agrega: “El miedo a reconocer su condición de seres libres no sólo ha fabricado tiranos . . . ; también grandes novelas.” “La tranquilidad de saber que el trabajo es legal, no vivir con el susto de la policía, de que los tiras te caigan encima y te saquen en un minuto lo que has ganado en un mes. . . . Hasta los cafiches andaban mansitos . . . .” “‘Benefits’ [prestaciones] was the euphemism used by Pantaleón for the sexual services rendered by his prostitutes.” “un total de 62.160 prestaciones . . . guarismo que, aunque muy por debajo de la demanda, prueba que en todo momento el Servicio utilizó su potencia operativa al máximo de su rendimiento—­ambición suprema de toda empresa productora.” a poetics of freedom  133

17. “Te mataré de cinco balazos como a un perro, en plena calle.” 18. “No quería de ningún modo ser un escritor a medias y a poquitos, sino uno de verdad, como ¿quién? Lo más cercano a ese escritor a tiempo completo, obsesionado y apasionado con su vocación, que conocía, era el radionovelista boliviano: por eso me fascinaba tanto.” 19. “Había establecido una censura inquisitorial en sus lecturas, prohibiéndole todos sus autores favoritos, que empezaban por Frank Yerby y terminaban con Corín Tellado.” 20. “una visión paródica de la actividad escritural . . . algo crucial para un narrador realista: la dificultad (o imposibilidad) de escribir novelas que no alteren la misma realidad a la que quieren ser fieles.” 21. “Por increíble que parezca, pervertido como yo estaba por la teoría del compromiso en su versión sartreana, intenté al principio contar esta historia en serio. Descubrí que era imposible, que ella exigía la burla y la carcajada. Fue una experiencia liberadora.” Selected Bibliography

Cayuela, Ricardo. Mario Vargas Llosa. Mexico City: Nostra, 2008. Oviedo, José Miguel. “La transición clave del realista” [The key transition of the realist]. Prologue to Obras completas by Mario Vargas Llosa, 2:9–­21. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2004. Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1935. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2002. —. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 1945. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2002. —. The Poverty of Historicism. 1957. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2002. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Karl Popper, al día” [Karl Popper, updated]. Vuelta 184 (March 1992): 24–­33. —. Obras completas [Complete works]. Vols. 1–­2. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2004. —. “Contar historias” [To tell stories]. Prologue to Obras completas by Mario Vargas Llosa, 1:9–­23. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2004.

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chapter 8

The Eye of the Beholder Mónica Lavín

A novel can be viewed in two ways: as a device for understanding human nature, and as an aesthetic offering. A novel is an imaginative construct whose visible substance is the word, and which comes into being as narrative art. In the final analysis, the novel as artifact has an optical quality. As Proust said, it is a loupe or a lens. It is an object for observing the world and ourselves. Like a telescope, it brings distant objects near, and, like a microscope, it enlarges the small. The novel is a mirror, and it reflects us. Mario Vargas Llosa gave the title La verdad de las mentiras (The truth about lies) ([1990] 2002) to one of his books of essays and to the first essay in that collection. The essay outlines his ideas about how novels should be written as well as his analyses of some of the classics that have become essential viewfinders for understanding the literary tradition on which we stand today. As popular wisdom rightly states, reality is in the eye of the beholder. The novel is this “eye” or word-­artifact—­for it is an artifact, and it is a structure, and it is art because it renews and suggests to us a way of relating to the world, both to our light and our darkness. It is a fiction that assumes a form based on the author’s decisions. As Vargas Llosa precisely defines it in his Cartas a un joven novelista (1997; Letters to a Young Novelist, 2002)—­an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to try their hand at the narrative decision-­making process—­its power of persuasion and mimesis is based on the choice of the what, that is, the story one wants to tell; and the how, the treatment or the lens through 135

10. Mónica Lavín at ccny with her students in the 2017 seminar of the Cátedra. Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

which the story will be told. What and how are the two intersecting axes of the novelistic artifice. In La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001), Vargas Llosa sets out to tell the story of the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who governed in the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. He focuses his retelling on the tyrant’s fall from power and shines his narrative spotlight on the day of his assassination. By means of flashbacks and conversations, he accretes the past events that have made the Goat into an idolized, feared, and hated figure. In a single day in the tyrant’s life, from when he rises at dawn and then methodically follows his daily program of personal grooming, appointments, and conversations with the people in his intimate circle, Vargas Llosa beautifully summarizes what the Benefactor has been. We witness the death of a monster whose days were numbered even before the plan to terminate him swung into motion that May 31, 1961. The church is not on good terms with him, the United States is on the verge of overthrowing him, and the public’s disaffection 136  mÓnica lavÍn

can no longer be suppressed in the same brutal way as with the “June 14th youth”—­a group that included the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were assassinated on November 25, 1960, in reprisal for their clandestine activities against the Trujillo regime. As the author sees him, Trujillo is a broken-­down beast. No matter to what lengths he goes with his personal hygiene and his orders to his subordinates, his visit to La Casa de Caoba (the dictator’s country villa) will never be as it was in the past. His urinary incontinence—­who can forget the scene in which his assistant places a napkin on his groin so that the moisture on his pant leg does not become public knowledge?—­and his faltering sexual performance announce his tameness and his imperiled virility. He is an old man, a billy goat who can no longer mount the female at will. I describe at some length here certain key incidents in the story Vargas Llosa sets out to write because I will inevitably refer to them from this point on in the essay. My analysis is in conversation with these details and scenes and their role in the precise narrative structure the author has designed. Vargas Llosa and the Evolution of the Flaubertian Polyphonic Narrative Structure

We are well aware how much Vargas Llosa admires the novel Madame Bovary. He has filled a good many pages discussing Flaubert’s role as the precursor of the modern novel, not only in his book-­length essay La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary (1975; The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary, 1986), but also in numerous articles in which he inevitably champions the survival of the novelistic genre when it appears to be threatened with extinction. In Madame Bovary, he sees reflected his own stylistic interests, such as when, by means of a seemingly trivial detail or minor character, Flaubert makes something extraordinary out of the commonplace and, in so doing, creates a lens for examining dreams, the death of dreams, and a woman’s desire to leave behind her prosaic life to become enmeshed in a love fantasy that will bring about her downfall. To read Madame Bovary is to understand the fragility that all of us, not only women, see in ourselves; it is an understanding that is achieved through the eye of the beholder  137

the formal work of the author. That is the Flaubertian lesson Vargas Llosa proposes to examine and then to adapt for his own use by endowing it with a new, formal scope. Vargas Llosa states that, with the use of the objective narrator who neither offers opinions nor controls either our interaction with the world that emerges on the page nor offers any feelings or judgements about the characters, Flaubert inaugurates a different type of narration. This new way of telling has a greater power of persuasion precisely because it permits autonomy to the characters whose stories are being told. The narrator is “un ente de palabras” (a word-­being), to use Vargas Llosa’s term, who is crucial to making the story emerge: in other words, somebody is telling the story. When this “word-­being” is a character, he has a role within the story and is therefore not the invisible figure—­this is part of the Flaubertian legacy to which Vargas Llosa often refers. Flaubert’s omniscient, invisible narrator is at enough of a remove to see the big picture about what is happening to various characters simultaneously in the fictionalized universe; this narrator does not express an opinion nor direct himself to the reader, but rather simply shows. By doing so, he allows the reader to participate in the narrated events in a different way, and this is the element that makes Madame Bovary a modern novel and the precursor of modern storytelling. Furthermore, the free indirect style—­a technical term that simply refers to the narrator’s license to make the characters’ thoughts visible in a natural way, that is to say, not quoting them, but rather showing their thoughts as if the reader were an accomplice to what is happening in the minds of the inhabitants of the narrated world—­is an essential formal contribution that became the precursor of the Joycean stream of consciousness and the novels of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Stephen Dedalus, Clarissa Dalloway, and Quentin Compson owe a debt to Flaubert for the freedom of their mental chaos, their weight on the page, and the way their narrated stories unfold. But, with 140 years of separation between the two novels, what relationship does Flaubert’s Madame Bovary have to the formal treatment Vargas Llosa chooses for La fiesta del Chivo? Along with his management of time, 138  mÓnica lavÍn

Vargas Llosa allows us to inhabit the perspectives of his principal characters, and their perspectives become the organizing principle of his novel. I refer here to the lesson that all writers and readers can learn from the Peruvian Nobel Laureate: the utility of point of view as an element of persuasion and verisimilitude. Vargas Llosa selects the points of view of Trujillo, Urania Cabral, and of each one of the conspirators in order to construct a “braid.” These braided perspectives permit, in turn, a rhythm in which suspense, movements back and forth in time, and a variety of perspectives apply pressure to the plot, making it taut. But, following the Flaubertian lesson, the point of view of each character avoids the monologue or first-­person narration that would necessarily seem evidently artificial—­I call it the crystal-­ball effect when I attempt to explain it to those interested in narrative art. Instead, the various perspectives of the characters are presented from the grammatical third person. That is to say, we see Urania walking down the street toward her father’s house in Santo Domingo in 1996; we can read her thoughts and the way in which she perceives the changes in the landscape and connects them with the Trujillo City she left behind thirty-­five years before. The reason for her departure will be the mystery that is revealed during the course of the plot. We also see Trujillo as he grooms himself in front of the mirror without hearing his thoughts as if he were speaking them, but rather by getting right inside of him, just as we see each one of the men waiting in the two cars stationed at strategic points on the dictator’s route. We learn about their states of mind as they face those long minutes of waiting and about their fear and anxiety, all of which becomes the means by which we find out who they are and why they are there. It is an idea that Thornton Wilder developed differently in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) when a priest decides to demonstrate that the convergence of the three victims is part of a divine plan and not merely bad luck. Here, although it is unlikely that they all coincide completely on their reasons for killing Trujillo, the conspirators’ own free wills put them in the position of facing this danger and, in so doing, of shaping history. Thus, the author makes use of the idea of the free indirect style with an avec narrator, to use a technical term, which is to say, a narrator that is the eye of the beholder  139

with (avec) the selected character, who sees only what he sees, and who can transmit to us his way of perceiving the world, his relationship with the past and with other people, but with one great advantage: the third person, as opposed to the subjectively biased first person, connects us in a clearer way to an objective truth, or at least it creates that illusion. In other words, the event does not emerge from a confessional statement that might or might not be true, tinged with madness or omissions; rather, the narrator allows us to see that character and what he sees. The result is a way of entering the landscape of the inner person and the intimate space without losing control of the outside view. That is, as readers, we see every character and what they see, think, and the way in which they remember the past in natural relationship with the plot. This is the first great Flaubertian lesson Vargas Llosa offers for the purpose of character creation. It is what a mere recounting of events and acts cannot reveal, but that the novel conversely can: we see the characters’ thoughts and feelings when they are alone with themselves; we learn who they really are; and the invisible becomes visible without the means by which it is done becoming obvious. According to Peruvian sociologist Gonzalo Portocarrero, that is how Vargas Llosa can avoid turning the dictator into a cliché, but rather can reveal the monster’s “in(humanity),” his fragility and fears. “He creates a convincing world, inhabited by true characters, even in their (in)humanity deeply human” (Portocarrero 2008, 164).1 Vargas Llosa shows a part of Trujillo that is not evident to others, and that belongs to the spirit of the novel: to show the unseen. He presents both the light and the darkness of the Goat. This multifocal choice allows for several protagonists in the novel: Trujillo, Urania, and each one of the conspirators who, after the assassination, will be reduced to being survivors for however long they are able to stay alive. But the fact is that Vargas Llosa invented and chose as the novel’s protagonist Urania Cabral, placing the action during her return to Santo Domingo from New York City in 1996, after her departure at age fourteen. Urania is the novel’s true protagonist because the reasons for her departure and her hatred of her father—­whom she mistreats despite 140  mÓnica lavÍn

the shattered shell of a man to which his illness has reduced him—­is the big reveal at the end. If Vargas Llosa has braided the storyline by means of the alternating perspectives of Trujillo, the conspirators, and Urania, the “lock of hair” that gives cohesion to the plot, though not to the historical facts, is Urania and her repudiation of her father, Urania and her mistrust of men, Urania and her determination to survive the great wrong done to her. One of the climactic chapters in the present-­tense narrative line is the one in which Urania visits her aunt and her cousins and tells them, in an almost casual way increasingly charged with sorrow and disillusionment, how she was sacrificed by her father and handed over to satisfy the voracious appetite of the tyrant. This chapter draws upon the rhythms and counterpoints that Flaubert achieves in chapter 18 of Madame Bovary in which Emma and Rodolphe converse inside a building as they look out on events related to the election in the plaza’s marketplace. We hear the action going on outside interspersed with the lovers’ conversation, provoking a sensation of simultaneity that movies are able to show, but that narrative has to employ other methods to achieve. If the conversation between Emma and Rodolphe reveals the divergent intentions of the lovers, the conversation between Urania and her relatives attempts to uncover the reasons behind the strangely timed flight of the young Urania and her silence toward and contempt for her father, “Cerebrito” Cabral. But here, the background noise is not what is going on in the town square and what the lovers hear and see through the window, but rather what is going on in Urania’s mind. Her past imposes itself like a live-­action scene and cannot be fully communicated to the women listening to her, while the reader has the privilege of contemplating it. While doing so, the reader increasingly becomes the young woman’s intimate ally along with every merciless truth she reveals. Time Management

The management of time—­its velocity and direction, its expansion or suspension—­is the narrator’s privilege. If the one who tells the story the eye of the beholder  141

plays God in such a way as to rule the destinies of his characters, then the God-­role is absolute in the use of time. Without time, there is no narrative: verbs must conjugate, incidents must follow one upon the other, the historical events must be organized. In her analysis of the novel, the critic Magdalena Defort speaks of a double helix, that is, the history and the fiction, and the way in which one and the other happen in a sort of spiral: “The two helixes interconnect, interweave. The fictional helix is a reflection of what the ‘historical’ helix deals with” (Defort 2008, 156).2 This urge to find graphic shapes to understand the structural conception of the novel is intriguing. La fiesta del Chivo is certainly a complex structure in which history and fiction are in dialogue and confront each other to bring to life the moment that the author has selected for its dramatic power. But in the novel the axes of time and velocity propelled by history and fiction also produce specific effects that contribute to the narrative strategy that the author sets out to realize. Let us examine the inner linings of the Vargas-­Llosian framework for this novel. The first story happens in the narrative present. It is Urania’s return, and it takes place over the course of a day in 1996 during which she visits her father and her aunt. The second story in the braid also happens during the course of a single day, that of Leónidas Trujillo’s assassination on May 31, 1961. This story unfolds in an arc from the time the dictator begins his day at 4:00 a.m. up until his date with death in his black Oldsmobile. The third “lock of hair” that completes the braid happens at 4:00 a.m. on May 31, 1961, as the conspirators wait for the dictator’s car to appear on his regular evening outing along the highway to San Cristóbal. Exploiting the possibility of expanding time by means of what he himself calls “psychological time,” the time of human consciousness, Vargas Llosa makes the minutes spent inside the two cars that lie in wait for the Goat pass by incredibly slowly. The point of view of the plot’s executors is an incomparable strategy for arriving at an understanding of the motivations of each one of them, their personal histories, and their states of mind during that long delay that aims to change the fate of a country and, without question, the fate of each one of them. We modern writers are 142  mÓnica lavÍn

the inheritors of the changes that marked the literature of the beginning of the twentieth century. The perception of the character, the Joycean stream of consciousness, and the day in the life of a Stephen Dedalus or a Clarissa Dalloway meander through an entire novel, showing that time can expand as far as the infinite mind will permit, and that it moves along two tracks: one, that of the events that can be measured by the astronomical time conventions of days, hours, minutes, and seconds; and the other, that of the arbitrary and free association of mental word-­play, as likely to be in one place or time as another, and in which a small detail looms large. Brandishing the power of time management is one of the powerful tools for creating the effect of the past in the present. As Urania returns to a city that has regained its former name—­Santo Domingo—­to face the ghosts of her past and the reasons for her escape, under that same sun and on those same streets in Trujillo City, we bear witness to the day she avenges to some extent the honor of the adolescent girl who was sexually assaulted by the Goat, the sacrificial victim offered up by her father to satisfy the appetite of the monster, who by then was no longer able to hold his own between the sheets. The dictator’s furious taking of her virginity with his fingers is a violation that tarnishes the rest of this successful woman’s life, a woman who, though she establishes a career in another country, has nevertheless lost her father, her trust, her innocence, and her ability to love. To summarize, the two days of Urania’s return to Santo Domingo overlap from three perspectives: that of Trujillo, Urania, and the group of conspirators. They are contained within the same space, in a city that has changed names along with the Goat’s omnipotent government and his own fall from power. Flaubert had already laid down the purposeful foundation for this sort of time expansion when in Madame Bovary he passed from the descriptive scene of Yonville’s exterior, the countryside, or the lovers’ rendezvous locations into the consciousness of the characters, all in a natural flow and via the previously described free indirect style. Vargas Llosa expands time to its limits when he successfully frames the pasts of each one of the characters waiting in the car within a short, concrete interval of time. Or the eye of the beholder  143

when, during Trujillo’s dinner party, he evokes another dinner in which the dialogues alternate as if they were unfolding in all their liveliness. Thus, past and present become juxtaposed, not only on the level of the clearly distinguishable times of Urania in the present versus May 31, 1961, but also in each scene of those two levels. The past is interspersed in the same way as when Mrs. Dalloway, after meeting her friend Peter Walsh, remembers (without the word “memory” being used as a key or passkey to introduce a previous time period) a scene in a summer garden during her adolescence. This way of weaving the past into the characters’ present lends the effect of vividness and of simultaneity: we are beings of the present along with the past scenes that make us who we are. The author, via his narrator, can demonstrate this as if he were striking a string on a music box without making the instrument visible, without revealing the scar that demonstrates the surgery. Simultaneity is yielded by technical management that respects history and is precise and premeditated in the way that mattered so much to Flaubert, as Vargas Llosa tells us in his La orgía perpetua. Mario Vargas Llosa could not be more in agreement with Flaubert, his literary master and the modernizer of the novel, or with the narrative strategies that since Flaubert’s time have deepened the persuasive power of the novel through painstaking work with form. Texture and Characters

Again, I cite chapter 16 of La fiesta del Chivo, when Urania visits her aunt Lucinda and her cousins. During that tea party full of friendly curiosity, Urania slips in devastating sentences that upset her family members. While on the level of memory but without the words “she remembered” interceding, a lively dialogue takes place in which she shows how her fate was sealed and how she was handed over to the Goat. We accept as credible scenes that Urania could not have observed in just that way, as well as details like word-­for-­word conversations, because later facts allow her to construct or, as part of the narrator’s authority, to know more than she realistically could know. Simultaneity—­the correspondence of time and space—­is one of the consistent means by which La fiesta del Chivo 144  mÓnica lavÍn

achieves a complex narrative texture that digs deeply into the mentality of each one of the characters involved. In this way, it weaves together thirty years of history with historical facts selected and emphasized by the author to account for the tyrant’s fateful day. The dictator has forged his own path and will fall victim to his own arrogance; he will turn a deaf ear to the Ides of March and walk right into danger because he refuses to give up taking his unguarded outings, because Trujillo City is his city, and all his attendants, secondary attendants, and subjects must pander to his slightest whim. Likewise, victims to their own nobility of spirit, the conspirators themselves will make the mistake which, along with the betrayal of their coconspirator Pupo (a general and Trujillo’s son-­in-­law), will lead to the death of all but one of them. Instead of killing the mortally wounded Pedro Livio, as they had agreed to do beforehand so that none of them could be forced to betray the others, the conspirators take him to the hospital. The technical construct, the polyphonic structure, the braid that functions on two levels of time and three perspectives, permits a deep dive into human nature and the fragilities portrayed in this novel about the exercise of absolute power. One of these is a polyphonic perspective that will progressively diminish as each of the conspirators dies, until the point of view of the key conspirator General Pupo Román appears, thus putting the last nail in the coffin of the aborted escape plan that followed Trujillo’s assassination. The other side of the coin becomes visible and La fiesta del Chivo evolves into more than the history of a dictatorship: it is the monstrous hell into which we may peer to see our own cruelest face, our own most naked fears, our own vulnerabilities, as well as dignity brandishing its sword on this battlefield of passions. It is an inferno of a novel that moves between the epic and the deeply intimate. The characters, placed in extreme situations and exposed both by history and the author’s choices, will reveal their internal contradictions: as a popular paradox goes, strengths are weaknesses—­a truth that this novel emphasizes. Trujillo must flaunt his absolute power, despite his knowledge of the obstacles facing him and the conspiracies all around. The student revolt had already happened; the Mirabal sisters had already been murdered, the eye of the beholder  145

though it was framed as an accident; the writer Ramón Marrero Aristy had already been assassinated for speaking against the government to the New York Times; the church was protesting the government’s behavior to the whole world. But the methods Trujillo learned from the U.S. Marines, his desire to separate himself from his plebeian past, his intimidating gaze, and the protective shield of forms that he has constructed and held up to public view must not reveal any cracks. And so, for all those reasons, his May 31 outing must be identical to those he has taken daily over the course of three decades: he will stop to visit his mother and then go to the Casa de Caoba. The conspirators, for their part, are honorable and loyal, virtues that have made them successful as the regime’s men, handpicked by Trujillo. They have already been put to the test by their family members’ murders and the destruction of their romantic relationships; but, when executing their elaborately conceived plot, they will find themselves incapable of being as cold and calculating as they had planned. They will break faith with the human details of their plan precisely because they are honorable and loyal and cannot bring themselves to sacrifice one of their own. They are not like the Goat, and therefore they do not want to destroy, and they cannot be the heartless creatures that the deed they are about to undertake requires them to be. They are courageous, but not soulless. The Goat, however, is precisely the latter. The conspirators find themselves in a tragic situation, because even after his death, the dictator continues to rule their destinies and free will to the extent that one of them, the Turk, asks himself when free will was ever theirs. Their destinies will be denied to them, and only later will time recognize them as heroes and martyrs and see the villainous caudillo as human scum. Vargas Llosa explores the machinery of tyrannical power in all its forms of seduction, imposition, and control. In doing so, he explores how evil spills way beyond the life of the one who embodies it and into his battered and wretched offspring, the expertly cruel despot that we see in Trujillo’s son Ramfis, while giving to Urania Cabral, the victim of an insatiable tyrant that demands young virgins to crown his masculinity and the absolute submission of his subjects, the opportunity to redeem not only herself, 146  mÓnica lavÍn

but also the destinies of other young victims of abuse. Vargas Llosa has made Urania into a modern Scheherazade who tells her story as if she were raising her voice not only for specific women, the youth or the wives of Trujillo’s subordinates who were forced into his bed, but also for all women today who are victims of sexual abuse and suffer both a physical and a psychic death. Thus, La fiesta del Chivo is much more than the story of the dismantling of the mechanism of power, or the schemes of a president like Joaquín Balaguer, whose cunning is the ace up the sleeve that allows him to control the future by exploiting the dictator’s vulnerability and his lack of education. Balaguer is the one who knows how to play his cards after the assassination, an event that suits him to perfection, and whose level of involvement in the assassination plot in the story remains a mystery. In veneration of Flaubert’s legacy, Vargas Llosa elaborates on the French author’s formal lesson to further exploit its possibilities. He makes the eye of the beholder, that is, each character’s perception of his reality, into a time framework characterized by the elements of expansion, psychological time, and counterpoint simultaneity. By doing so, the Peruvian Nobel Prizewinner weaves an effective and memorable tapestry that unsnarls the perverse threads of despotism, the consequences of the imposition of absolute power, and the need for redemption, which can only be met by telling the story as Urania does, as Mario Vargas Llosa does. Notes

Translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder. 1. “Crea un mundo convincente, poblado de personajes verdaderos, hasta en su (in)humanidad profundamente humanos.” 2. “Las dos hélices se entrecruzan, se entretejen. La hélice ficticia es un reflejo de lo que trata la hélice ‘histórica.’” Selected Bibliography

Defort, Magdalena. “Historia y ficción en La fiesta del Chivo de Mario Vargas Llosa” [History and fiction in The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa]. Itinerarios 7 (2008):149–­63. the eye of the beholder  147

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Edited and translated by Consuelo Bergés. Prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1981. Fuentes, Carlos. “Nuestro tirano nacional favorito” [Our favorite national tyrant]. La Nación (Argentina), February 10, 2011. Luna Escudero Alie, María Elvira. “Transgresión y sacrificio de Urania Cabral en La fiesta del Chivo de MVL” [Urania Cabral’s violation and sacrifice in The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa]. Espéculo. Revista de Estudios Literarios 24 (2003):1–­8. Portocarrero, Gonzalo. “El Dios impotente: la (in)humanidad de Trujillo en La fiesta del Chivo” [The impotent god: Trujillo’s (in)humanity in The Feast of the Goat]. In Las guerras de este mundo: Sociedad, poder y ficción en la obra de Mario Vargas Llosa [The wars in this world: Society, power, and fiction in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa], ed. Alonso Cueto, 155–­65. Lima: Planeta, 2008. Vargas Llosa, Mario. Cartas a un joven novelista. Mexico City: Planeta, 1997. Translated by Natasha Wimmer as Letters to a Young Novelist (New York: Picador; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). —. La fiesta del Chivo. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Feast of the Goat (New York: Picador; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). —. “Flaubert, nuestro contemporáneo” [Flaubert, our contemporary]. Letras Libres (Mexico) 6, no. 64 (2004): 50–­55. Accessed April 30, 2018. http://​www​ .letraslibres​.com​/mexico​/flaubert​-nuestro​-contemporáneo. —. La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary. Mexico City: Punto de Lectura, 1975. Translated by Helen Lane as The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986). —. “La verdad de las mentiras” [The truth about lies]. In La verdad de las mentiras. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002. First published 1990 by Seix Barral (Barcelona). Translated by John King as “The Truth about Lies.” In Making Waves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

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chapter 9

Historical Fact/Historical Fiction in The Feast of the Goat Ángel L. Estévez

Nearly two decades after the publication of La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001) it is fair to say that this novel has been, so far, the most controversial that Mario Vargas Llosa has published. As the title of this essay suggests, the novel deals with the historical re-­creation of the dictatorship led by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. The reactions of readers to this book were immediate. On one side there were those who praised the author’s narrative talents to artistically articulate and re-­create the essence of an era in Dominican society, acclaiming La fiesta del Chivo as a masterpiece and one of the best, if not the best, of Vargas Llosa’s novels; there were others who despised both novel and author for distorting such an important (and, to many, intimate) era in Dominican history and politics. Furthermore, the author was accused of plagiarizing the sources he consulted and charged with portraying the Dominican people as possessing a passivity that kept the entire nation demoralized and subdued for over thirty years of dictatorship.1 The first group of readers is best represented, in general, by literary critics and journalists; the second, by historians. This essay has been conceived as a response to the initial reception of La fiesta del Chivo, with special emphasis on the dynamics of the intertwining of history and literature in the historical novel.

149

11. Daniel E. Shapiro, editor of Review; Mónica Lavín; and Ángel L. Estévez, director of ccny’s master of arts program in Spanish, during the events of the 2017 Cátedra. Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

Fundamentals of Literature and the Literary Text

There appears to be a general misconception among readers about the relationship between history and fiction and their interaction in the literary text. A brief examination of the conventions of a literary text might shed some light, first on the nature of literature, and second on the role history plays when both fiction and history are found in the same text. Is it possible to tell them apart? Let us start by stating that a novel, whether historical, psychological, or realist, is an aesthetic product. Fiction writers are artists whose most important tool is language. One of the basic and most fundamental conventions of narrative fictional works is the creation of a believable world, one that takes the appearance of the real, familiar world with which the readers can identify. In order for readers to enjoy this “aesthetic product,” there must be an implicit agreement between writer and reader in which both become aware of and comply with the rules of the game they are playing. However, this is not always the case. So, what can go wrong? 150  Ángel l. estÉvez

Since writers must have an expert management of language, their success in making the world of narrative believable depends on the appropriate manipulation of language. Aguiar e Silva has observed that the use of language in a literary work acquires unique powers of representation to create a desired world vision. He refers to this particular use of language as the “poetic function of language”: “The poetic function of language is characterized, primarily and essentially, by the fact that the message creates in an imaginative manner its own reality. . . . This is precisely why literary language can be explained, but not verified: this language constitutes a discourse contextually closed and semantically organic, which establishes its own truth” (1986, 16–­17, italics in the original; my translation).2 The fact that literary language can be explained but not verified is a fundamental principle in literature. For instance, the world represented by Vargas Llosa in La fiesta del Chivo can certainly be explained but cannot be verified: it cannot be verified because only the author is entitled to tailor the exact dimensions of that world, its codes, and its truth. As an example, let us examine the narrative voice as it tells us about the encounter between Trujillo and Antonio de la Maza, when Trujillo denies having anything to do with the assassination of Tavito, Antonio’s younger brother. The narrator describes the effect Trujillo’s gaze had upon Antonio: He was a meter away. Antonio could not endure Trujillo’s unmoving gaze, and he blinked unnecessarily. . . . Why didn’t he attack when he had him so close? . . . It was something more subtle and indefinable than fear: it was the paralysis, the numbing of determination, reason, and free will, which this man, groomed and adorned to the point of absurdity, with this thin high-­pitched voice and hypnotist’s eyes, imposed on Dominicans, poor or rich, educated or ignorant, friends or enemies, and it was what held Antonio there, mute, passive, listening to those lies, the lone observer of the hoax, incapable of acting on his desire to attack him and put an end to the witches’ Sabbath that the history of the country had become. (2001, 87–­88)3 historical fact/historical fiction  151

This is one of the most compelling characterizations of Trujillo in the novel, but it is all fabricated by the author. This type of subjective depiction of a historical figure will not be found in a history textbook. Although many of those who knew Trujillo well may attest to this depiction as being accurate, in the novel it is only true within the pages of the book. Besides, who witnessed this meeting between Trujillo and Antonio in addition to the omniscient entity in charge of telling the story? The reader is only capable of imagining it. The textual universe created in the novel only comes to life when readers engage themselves in the act of reading. Aguiar e Silvia explains further: Between the imaginary world created by literary language and the real world, there are always bonds, for literary fiction can never detach itself from empirical reality. The real world is the primordial and direct source of a literary work; but literary language does not allude directly to that world, does not denote it: it establishes, in fact, its own reality, a world vision, with specific structures and dimensions. It is not about the distortion of the real world, but about the mere creation of a new reality, that always maintains a meaningful relation with objective reality. (1986, 18)4

In other words, it is the particular manipulation of language that determines whether or not the reader may have access to the text’s “own reality.” Furthermore, a distinction must be made between the nature of the language used in fiction and in nonfiction. “Literary language is polyvalent because in it the linguistic sign is bearer of multiple semantic dimensions and tends to a multivalent signification, distancing itself from an unambiguous meaning, which is typical of univocal languages (logical discourse, legal discourse, etc.)” (Aguiar e Silva 1986, 20).5 Of course, historical discourse must be included here as well. We infer from these concepts that poetic language, as opposed to scientific language, is elastic, as it lends itself to multiple possible meanings whereas scientific language is much more restrictive and does not allow room for subjective interpretations. Wellek and Warren shared this view when contrasting these two functions of language: 152  Ángel l. estÉvez

Thus scientific language tends towards such a system of signs as mathematics or symbolic logic. . . . Compared to scientific language, literary language will appear in some ways deficient. It abounds in ambiguities; it is, like every other historical language, full of homonyms, arbitrary or irrational categories such as grammatical gender; it is permeated with historical accidents, memories, and associations. In a word, it is highly “connotative.” (1956, 23)

The reader, however, may not know when or how to recognize these distinctions during the act of reading. Therefore, it is understandable that many readers of La fiesta del Chivo initially reacted expressing mixed feelings about the novel. A one-­dimensional reading of any work of fiction is bound to produce a distorted interpretation. As Wellek and Warren explain, There is a central and important difference between a statement, even in a historical novel or a novel by Balzac which seems to convey “information” about actual happenings, and the same information appearing in a book of history or sociology. . . . A character in a novel differs from a historical figure or a figure in real life. He is made only of the sentences describing him or put into his mouth by the author. He has no past, no future, and sometimes no continuity of life. (1956, 25)

Initial reactions to La fiesta del Chivo seem to have been generated by the expectations created by the title and theme of the novel; the average reader, but also some journalists, educators, and even historians, criticized the lack of historical veracity found in the narrative. Since the novel reconstructs a specific era in the political and social history of the Dominican Republic (that of Trujillo, 1930–­61), many readers assumed that Vargas Llosa had the obligation to remain faithful to that period and produce a photographic depiction of both the time and people. These readers disregard the fact that Vargas Llosa is not a historian nor did he intend to reproduce a historical account of Trujillo’s regime in the novel.6 As stated earlier, La fiesta del Chivo is an aesthetic product, an artistic literary re-­creation of a historical figure and his sinister mechanisms of historical fact/historical fiction  153

power, which has been conceived as a historical novel and all the ramifications it allows for, as we will see below. The author himself has put it plainly: “The reenactment of the past that operates in literature is almost always fallacious in terms of historical objectivity. Literary truth is one thing and historical truth another” (quoted in Gewecke 2001, 154; my translation).7 Elsewhere, Vargas Llosa has commented: “And many are ‘historical characters’; President Joaquín Balaguer or the martyrs of 30 May (the group who put an end to Trujillo’s life) are treated sometimes like fictional beings, with the narrator taking the usual liberties taken with characters who are invented” (El País Digital April 28, 2000, 3; my translation).8 The reception of the novel, especially in the Dominican Republic, generated heated discussion and criticism. Among those who commended it (and still do) are members of families who were affected directly by Trujillo’s tyranny (antitrujillistas) and find that Vargas Llosa’s work is, in their view, a tribute to those who sacrificed their own lives in order to recover civil and political liberties in the country. Opposed are those (trujillistas) who supported the regime (and still do), demonstrating that Trujillismo lived on through his successor Joaquín Balaguer and beyond. Pedro Conde Sturla’s comments illustrate well the long-­lasting influences of the Generalísimo: Vargas Llosa came to the country to research and write about Trujillo thinking Trujillo was dead and buried and a fuss broke out—­a huge fuss—­ because Trujillo still lives and rules, his legacy lives on and rules. His successors have held and hold unlawful positions of power; they rule, have influence, affect decision-­making, manipulate, and participate in all layers of society. (2000, 14)9

In terms of the conventions of the novel as an aesthetic product, historical truth is a much-­debated aspect of the account. In fact, as previously mentioned, the most passionate arguments have centered upon whether or not the novel adheres to historical facts and concern much less the novelistic aspects of the text. In the opinion of Felipe 154  Ángel l. estÉvez

González, La fiesta del Chivo “reveals the essence of the dictatorship. The novel is truer than truth itself. A documented account about the dictatorship of Trujillo would never convey to us such a clear vision” (Lefere 2001, 331; my translation).10 The opinion of the Argentinean novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez may suggest the ideal alternative to approach and properly assess the novel. This author recommends that “one needs to approach The Feast of the Goat . . . in a state of innocence: that is, letting the author guide us without constantly asking him what is true and what is a lie, or why this or that character, inspired by some buffoon or some victim of Trujillo’s regime, differs from the real person” (quoted in Gewecke 2001, 152; my translation).11 Such a “state of innocence” has been impossible for a good number of readers to achieve. However, there is an important misconception that needs to be clarified: historical figures will not (and cannot) appear in a fixed, immutable fashion throughout time because each generation will see these figures through the eyes of their current times and values. Terry Eagleton summarizes this idea as follows: All literary works, in other words, are “rewritten,” if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a “re-­writing.” No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair. (1983, 12; my italics)

Having established the artistic, subjective nature of literature in general and the additional liberties assumed by writers of historical novels in particular, readers should expect neither complete adherence to empirical reality in a novel nor objective historical truth. It is, then, futile and unproductive to attempt to set clear boundaries between history and fiction. A more productive exercise would be to navigate the novel acknowledging the coexistence and intermingling of history and literature. The exchange can be continued, underscoring what each field has to offer to enrich readers and acquire a better understanding of the period in which the text is produced. historical fact/historical fiction  155

Narrative Structure of La fiesta del Chivo

La fiesta del Chivo is structured following state-­of-­the art narrative techniques, which is a common feature among authors of the so-­called new Latin American novel. There are two alternate time frames along the story line. The first time frame is narrated from Urania’s perspective; she is the daughter of Agustín Cabral (alias Cerebrito) and has returned to the Dominican Republic after thirty-­five years of exile in the United States. Urania’s account is often rendered in retrospect in order to show the stages of her life as an adolescent (Uranita) and also to establish a very close father-­daughter relationship. Agustín Cabral was the president of the Senate and a close collaborator of Trujillo. Many pages of La fiesta del Chivo re-­create the state of anguish and anxiety suffered by Cabral upon finding out he had been suddenly removed from his post without any apparent reason. Cabral had “fallen out of favor” with El Jefe.12 Within this first time frame also are the accounts of the seven male conspirators, impatient yet determined, who are kept waiting for Trujillo to leave for his Casa de Caoba, the same night of May 30, before they ambushed and assassinated him. The novel allows for each of the seven men to give his own motivation for putting an end to Trujillo’s life, and also to tell from his own perspective what the country had been going through since “almighty” Trujillo took office. The fact that not all the conspirators hold the same social status is cleverly exploited by Vargas Llosa to provide a way to invade the privacy of each of these men’s lives, whether their domestic and social preferences or their civil and political activity. From the point of view of the novelist, this was a strategic way to re-­create the general mood of the population, especially in the final asphyxiating years at the end of the Trujillo era. There is no chronological order to the twenty-­four narrative sections of the novel; all accounts are mediated by a narrative voice which comes in and out of each character’s mind, allowing the author to permeate and secure a subjective tone to the novel. As we will discuss shortly, the subjective nature of the novel is in opposition to objective historical discourse. The narrative voice generates a sense of empathy in the reader 156  Ángel l. estÉvez

as the perspective of the story shifts from one character’s account to the other, and this contributes to an ever-­increasing anticipation about what will happen next. Urania/Uranita, Cerebrito, Balaguer, the seven conspirators and the other characters in the novel are all fictitious.13 They all share the same world invented by the novelist. But of all of them, Urania is the one who knows the most about the dictator and his regime. We can even say that the perspective of the omniscient narrator is that of Urania; also, it could be said that this is Vargas Llosa’s perspective. Even though Urania is not physically present in all sections of the novel, her long years of reading about the regime while in New York and her intimate experience underlie and connect all the narrative segments of the novel. In spite of the initial challenges to the historicity of La fiesta del Chivo, the novel realistically re-­creates the atmosphere of the last few years of the tyranny as well as the tone, the tension, and, above all, the unease and anguish generated by the omnipresence of El Jefe. Vargas Llosa has made use of long years in the craft of writing to render not only a credible account but also a convincing one. Due to the limitations of this essay, we will comment only on two examples. Without a doubt, the worst nightmare for any citizen, whether openly in favor or surreptitiously against the regime, was to find his name on the infamous newspaper section called El Foro Público. This was the case of Agustín Cabral, president of the Senate. It is hard to imagine for an informed reader that Trujillo would want to publicly humiliate one of his government officials in such a high position. Agustín has no idea what might have triggered the anger of the Chief and caused his downfall. After running out of options, feeling stigmatized among colleagues, and consumed by anxiety and uncertainty, Agustín Cabral takes the advice of Manuel Alfonso, “the playboy who got women for Trujillo” (2001, 256) to protest and repair his disgrace. Manuel Alfonso, a close consultant to Trujillo in these matters, insinuates to Agustín that he should offer his daughter, fourteen-­year-­old Uranita, in exchange for his vindication. Manuel Alfonso puts himself in Agustín’s shoes and says to him: historical fact/historical fiction  157

Do you know something, Egghead? I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. Not to regain his confidence, not to show him that I’m capable of any sacrifice for him. Simply because nothing would give me more satisfaction, more happiness, than to have the Chief give pleasure to a daughter of mine and take his pleasure with her. (2001, 266)14

Readers unfamiliar with Trujillo’s obsessive habits of control might find Cabral’s decision to sacrifice his daughter to the Goat as unprecedented. Vargas Llosa, in fact, is not exaggerating but convincingly reconstructing a practice that was more common than one would like to expect during Trujillo’s regime. Offering young girls (and young grown women) to the Chief is still in the collective memory of the Dominican people and in the anecdotes collected by historians (Weldt-­Basson 2009, 118–­20). The novel also imagines other key situations that illustrate the absolute power and control on which Trujillo founded the dictatorship. Amado García Guerrero’s failed wedding to Luisa Gil is another example. Lieutenant Amado García Guerrero, one of the seven conspirators, was stationed at the National Palace and served directly under Trujillo. To test Amadito’s loyalty, Trujillo rejects his petition for marriage to Luisa Gil. And that was to be taken as an order: “He clicked his heels and saluted. He left with a martial step, hiding the anguish that paralyzed him. A soldier obeyed orders, especially if they came from the Benefactor and Father of the New Nation. . . . If he had given that order to him, a privileged officer, it was for his own good. He had to obey” (2001, 32–­33).15 What stands out here is the total subjection of a lieutenant who renounces his upcoming marriage so as to not upset Trujillo. It appears that an audience with Trujillo and Trujillo’s gaze was all it took for anybody to surrender to the dictator’s wishes. Repeatedly, the narrator refers to Trujillo’s look as “a gaze that no one could endure without lowering his own eyes, intimidated and annihilated by the force radiating from those piercing eyes that seemed to read one’s most secret thoughts and most hidden desires and appetites, and made people feel naked” (2001, 31).16 It is this hypnotizing and obsessive power that drove most Dominicans 158  Ángel l. estÉvez

to a total mental paralysis, as if bewitched, haunted by the possibility of being watched, followed, or betrayed by a calié.17 Vargas Llosa successfully re-­creates what is usually not recorded by historians, thanks to his meticulous investigations into Trujillo’s era and the sociopolitical repercussions of that legacy. La fiesta del Chivo, then, integrates conventional literary components that are typical of the novel. Literature, as we have shown, uses a language that is polyvalent, thus creating its own reality. Let us keep in mind that the world of this novel may be explained but not verified. That said, let us now explore the nature of historical discourse. Historical Discourse and the Historical Novel

The novelistic approach to Latin American history has received much attention, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. The historical novel and biographical histories have been the subject of many studies. For example, Seymour Menton, in his Latin America’s New Historical Novel (1993), distinguishes the traditional historical novel from a new historical novel. According to Menton, the publication in 1949 of Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World, 1957) marked a significant evolution. From then on, there have been many novels that have scrutinized different periods and historical figures in Latin American history. The commemoration in 1992 of Christopher Columbus’s arrival to America was one of the most important sources of inspiration for Latin American writers. The novelistic treatment of history has, however, generated dynamic discussions among scholars in both disciplines. Because both history and literature have constantly mixed in the making of these novels, numerous attempts have been made to set a satisfactory definition for the historical novel, but most of them have been considered too narrow. Helen C. Weldt-­Basson, after considering what might be useful from previous definitions, proposes one that might serve, for the time being, to assess a specific modality of these historical renditions.18 She describes novels that historical fact/historical fiction  159

use history symbolically. In other words, they portray a concrete historical figure or event to mediate upon another, different historical event or historical tendency. . . . Vargas Llosa’s exploration of the Trujillo government is in large part a reflection on other, more contemporary dictatorships and their psychological effects of the people of their countries, specifically, the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori in Perú. (2009, 125–­26)

But whether the historical novel provides an alternate view of the past, a questioning of an “official” historical account, or reflects upon other historical events elsewhere, the reconstruction of the past through a novelistic approach continues to attract Latin American writers. It is fair to say that literature and history will continue to complement each other, regardless of critiques by scholars of history might say. What readers witness in La fiesta del Chivo is, then, not new at all. Let us remember for a moment that both fields have a long tradition, whether one thinks of the spoken or written word. In the composition of the novel, Vargas Llosa not only drew upon written records (mainly history books and newspapers) of Trujillo’s era but also gained important insights from interviews with persons who either were part of the regime or had managed to survive its oppression and repression. Seen from this perspective, Vargas Llosa has operated as a historian, gathering a vast amount of documented evidence. The reconstruction of the past through the collection of written or oral evidence is what scholars call historical empiricism. However, questions have arisen regarding the veracity of the data and details presented by the author in his novel. If Vargas Llosa conducted his research motivated by the search for historical truth, were his findings impartial? This question applies not only to cases involving the historical novel in particular but also to historical inquiry in general. One of the foundational aspects of historical inquiry since the nineteenth century until today is the principle of empiricism. Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, paraphrasing Leopold von Ranke, a leading scholar in the empirical approach, point out that “historians should refrain from judging the past, and simply describe what actually 160  Ángel l. estÉvez

happened” (2016, 14). Historians’ work, they say, should be based on “impartial research, devoid of a priori beliefs and prejudices” (2016, 15). Was Vargas Llosa able to set aside his own beliefs and prejudices for the sake of objective truth? This has been a crucial question among readers with respect to the re-­creation of the era of Trujillo in La fiesta del Chivo. As Green and Troup put the question, “[T]o what extent can historians, embedded in their own time and place, either fully understand the ways in which historical actors perceived their world, or lay aside their own conceptual, social, or cultural perspectives?” (2016, 17). Is it really possible to remain impartial? Hybrid Discourses

A good, well-­known example of this empirical historical vision is that of Latin American colonial history. The “official” account of the conquest and the subsequent colonization conveys a historical narrative that does not quite coincide with the vision of the colonized. The question of whether or not historians can be unprejudiced has generated an important debate among intellectuals. We can safely assume, for now, that historians, much less writers of historical novels, cannot possibly remain unprejudiced, especially if they have a personal interest in the subject of their research. Vargas Llosa has criticized despotism in Latin America on several occasions. His comments about totalitarian regimes are, in fact, a clear sign of his stance against dictatorships. His reconstruction of Trujillo’s tyranny in La fiesta del Chivo is proof of his high degree of prejudice at the time he conceived this novel. It is understandable from this perspective that Vargas Llosa did not intend to play the role of the historian, as his approach to history in the novel has a profound subjective motivation. Writers of historical novels, we may conclude, regardless of how hard they try to stay true to the reconstruction of a historical event, will always leave room for relativism, “the belief that absolute truth is unattainable, and that all statements about history are connected or relative to the position of those who make them” (Green and Troup 2016, 20). historical fact/historical fiction  161

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, historians and the field of history as a whole, have been the target of noteworthy attacks. The advent of the so-­called postmodern condition seems to have paved the way for key conversations among historians about the nature of what they do in their field, mainly, the question of historical epistemology and the acquisition of objective knowledge. Postmodernist critiques, especially in the 1990s, evolved into a debate and the debate turned into a crisis in which “historians . . . are haunted by a growing, fin-­de-­siècle sense of gloom,” as Richard J. Evans comments (1999, 3).19 Shortly after, he adds: “History has been shaken right down to its scientific and cultural foundations” (1999, 3).20 Although no one has coined a satisfactory definition of what postmodernism is, we will use, for the time being, one by Peter Novick, whose words are paraphrased by Julián Casanova: “the term postmodernism was chosen to describe the various and convergent ‘assaults to received notions of objectivity known around the academic world since the decade of the 1960s’” (2004, 4; my translation).21 Casanova comments further that “what happened to the term postmodernism is what happened to other terms appended with ‘post,’ like ‘postindustrial’ or ‘poststructuralist,’ which seem to reflect ‘the chaos, confusion, and crisis’ that allegedly substitute adopted conventional norms, but no one actually ‘has a clear perception of what is in the making’” (2004, 4; my translation).22 In other words, the challenge postmodernists pose to historians derives from the ever-­growing weakening of the positivism of the nineteenth century and the practice of empiricism, which resulted in the twentieth century’s advent of relativism. Ever since the 1990s, the idea of objective scholarship has become increasingly questioned. It does not seem coincidental that La fiesta del Chivo was written as the postmodernist claims were emerging and that the novel was published at the turn of the new century. It is evident that Vargas Llosa has stepped into a terrain traditionally claimed by historians. It is no less evident that his intentions were not to rewrite the history of the era of Trujillo; as he is a novelist, Vargas Llosa aimed at telling the story of it. From a postmodernist stance, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner is paying 162  Ángel l. estÉvez

close attention to the debate among historians. As a writer obsessed with Latin American history, he offers his own artistic view. His novel does not necessarily follow the manner in which things actually happened, but rather offers the story of how things could have happened. Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo is a reconstruction of the past, for the most part loyal to historical facts, which allows him to convey that knowledge “framed through structures of language and discourse” (Green and Troup 2016, 4). Magdalena Perkowska elaborates this idea further: Upon incorporating, questioning or reflecting upon renovating ideas about contemporary historiography and some postmodern premises about history, the recent historical novel establishes a second Latin American locus of meditation about history. Revisiting old and renowned historical territories and objects, or exploring and discovering unknown zones, unexplored or blurred, novelists lay out a new map for the concept of history and its discourse. Observed from this perspective, the Latin American historical novel does not cancel out history but rather redefines the space declared as “historical” by tradition, convention and power, proposing and configuring instead hybrid histories that intend to imagine other times, other possibilities, other histories and discourses. (2008, 42; my translation)23

Toward the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first, Latin American novelists, besides utilizing conventional means to create fictional worlds, have felt the need to surreptitiously appropriate the discourse of historians. These novelists “narrate, but also think, reflect about history and its paths” (Perkowska 2008, 42; my translation).24 Conclusion

It has been established by literary theory that language used in a literary text is highly connotative and polyvalent. It creates its own reality. Hence the idea that a novel, for instance, is an aesthetic creation whose highly subjective world vision, although maintaining a recognizable relation to empirical reality, can only be explained but not verified. Historical discourse, on the other hand, must adhere to an unambiguous language, whose final product historical fact/historical fiction  163

is expected to be an objective account of a past event. As we have seen, in a historical novel both literature and history intercept each other and at that meeting point blend, generating a hybrid discourse that is difficult to disentangle. It is at this intersection where readers meet La fiesta del Chivo. We may never fully tell apart fiction from history in a historical novel. Historians are aware of the interstices of their discipline, and they reluctantly understand that historical discourse is under assault from neighboring discourses and the historical novel might be the most menacing of all. Vargas Llosa is well aware of his role as a writer of historical novels when he expresses his views of the relationship between historical fact and narrative fiction in his essay “The Truth about Lies”: Successful fiction embodies the subjectivity of an epoch and for that reason, although compared to history novels lie, they communicate to us fleeting and evanescent truths that always escape scientific descriptions of reality. Only literature has the techniques and power to distill this delicate elixir of life: the truth hidden in the heart of human lies. (Cited by Weldt-­Basson 2009, 115)25

How faithful has La fiesta del Chivo been to the Trujillo era? The answer to this question may never be satisfactory. The process of reconstructing the past for both historians and writers of historical novels is comparable to the craft of translation. Edith Grossman’s brilliant rendition into English of La fiesta del Chivo is as faithful as Vargas Llosa has been to the era of Trujillo. Notes

1. According to critics, the sources from which Vargas Llosa obtained most of the details about Trujillo’s dictatorship are: Trujillo: La muerte del dictador (1978) by Bernard Diederich, and Trujillo: La trágica aventura del poder personal (1968) by Robert D. Crassweller. 2. “la función poética del lenguaje se caracteriza primaria y esencialmente por el hecho de que el mensaje crea imaginariamente su propia realidad. . . . Por eso precisamente el lenguaje literario puede ser explicado, pero no verificado: este 164  Ángel l. estÉvez

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

lenguaje constituye un discurso contextualmente cerrado y semánticamente orgánico, que instituye una verdad propia.” “Estaba a un metro de distancia. Antonio no podía resistir la mirada quieta de Trujillo y pestañeaba sin cesar . . . ¿Por qué no saltó sobre él cuando lo tuvo tan cerca? . . . Era algo más sutil e indefinible que el miedo: esa parálisis, el adormecimiento de la voluntad, del raciocinio y del libre albedrío que aquel personajillo acicalado hasta el ridículo, de vocecilla aflautada y ojos de hipnotizador, ejercía sobre los dominicanos pobres o ricos, cultos o incultos, amigos o enemigos, lo que lo tuvo allí, mudo, pasivo, escuchando aquellos embustes, espectador solitario de esa patraña, incapaz de convertir en acción su voluntad de saltar sobre él y acabar con el aquelarre en que se había convertido la historia del país” (Vargas Llosa 2016, 121–­22). “Entre el mundo imaginario creado por el lenguaje literario y el mundo real, hay siempre vínculos, pues la ficción literaria no se puede desprender jamás de la realidad empírica. El mundo real es la matriz primordial y mediata de la obra literaria; pero el lenguaje literario no se refiere directamente a ese mundo, no lo denota: instituye, efectivamente, una realidad propia, un heterocosmo, de estructura y dimensiones específicas. No se trata de una deformación del mundo real, pero sí de la creación de una realidad nueva, que mantiene siempre una relación de significado con la realidad objetiva.” “El lenguaje literario es plurisignificativo porque, en él, el signo lingüístico es portador de múltiples dimensiones semánticas y tiende a una multivalencia significativa, huyendo del significado unívoco, que es propio de los lenguajes monosignificativos (discurso lógico, lenguaje jurídico, etc.).” Pedro Conde Sturla has assessed the novel appropriately by saying: “The Feast of the Goat is a novel, not history, and one cannot dismiss a novel by its lack of adherence to reality. Those who support this initiative see it from a false perspective: they analyze or assess the work of art by what it should be and not by what it is” (2000, 14; my translation). (La fiesta del Chivo es novela y no es historia, y no se puede descalificar a una novela por su falta de apego a la realidad. Quienes proceden de esta manera se sitúan en una perspectiva falsa: analizan o juzgan la obra de arte por lo que debería ser y no por lo que es.) “La recomposición del pasado que opera en la literatura es casi siempre falaz juzgada en términos de objetividad histórica. La verdad literaria es una y otra la verdad histórica.” historical fact/historical fiction  165

8. “Y muchos personajes históricos los son entre comillas; el presidente Joaquín Balaguer o los mártires del 30 mayo (el grupo que acabó con la vida de Trujillo) están tratados a veces como personajes de ficción, tomándose el narrador las libertades que se toman con personajes inventados.” 9. “Vargas Llosa vino al país a documentarse y escribir sobre Trujillo pensando que Trujillo estaba muerto y enterrado y se desató un escándalo—­tamaño escándalo—­porque Trujillo vive y manda, su herencia vive y manda. Sus sucesores han detentado y detentan posiciones de poder y mandan, influyen, determinan, manipulan, inciden en todos los capítulos de la sociedad.” 10. Cited by Robin Lefere who takes the quote from a talk by Vargas Llosa at Casa de América in Madrid and reproduced in El País, March 31, 2001, p. 25: “La fiesta del Chivo . . . descubre la esencia de la dictadura. La novela es más verdad que la verdad. Un relato documentado de la dictadura de Trujillo nunca nos daría una visión tan clara.” 11. Frauke Gewecke takes this quote from “La resurrección del dictador,” El País, April 15, 2000, p. 15: “Hay que acercarse a La fiesta del Chivo . . . en estado de inocencia: es decir, dejándose llevar por el autor sin preguntarle a cada paso qué es mentira o qué es verdad o por qué aquel o este personaje, inspirado en algún bufón o en alguna víctima del trujillismo, difiere de la figura real.” 12. “Falling out of favor” during Trujillo’s dictatorship could represent a life-­ threatening situation. Anybody publicly exposed in El Foro Público of the newspapers for showing the slightest sign of antitrujillismo was doomed. 13. Although most characters in the novel correspond, in one way or another, to a real person associated with Trujillo’s regime, Uranita/Urania belongs to the sheer imagination of Vargas Llosa. 14. “¿Sabes una cosa, Cerebrito? Yo no hubiera vacilado ni un segundo. No para reconquistar su confianza, no para mostrarle que soy capaz de cualquier sacrificio por él. Simplemente, porque nada me daría más satisfacción, más felicidad, que el Jefe hiciera gozar a una hija mía y gozara con ella.” (2016, 348) 15. “Hizo sonar los tacos y saludó. Salió con paso marcial, disimulando la zozobra que lo embargaba. Un militar obedecía las órdenes, sobre todo si venían del Benefactor y Padre de la Patria Nueva. . . . Si le había dado esa orden a él, oficial privilegiado, era por su propio bien. Debía obedecer.” (2016, 50) 16. “Una mirada que nadie podía resistir sin bajar los ojos, intimidado, aniquilado por la fuerza que irradiaban esas pupilas perforantes, que parecía leer los 166  Ángel l. estÉvez

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

pensamientos más secretos, los deseos y apetitos ocultos, que hacía sentirse desnudas a las gentes.” (2016, 48) A calié was a sort of informant to government officials, especially to the agents of sim (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar / Military Intelligence Service) led by Johnny Abbes. Weldt-­Basson (2009) discusses four categories of historical novels and among the critics she comments on are Naomi Jacobs, Seymour Menton, and Noé Jitrik. For more on this discussion, see pages 126–­27 of her article. In his introduction to In Defense of History (1999), Evans summarizes some of the most relevant reactions to the claims of postmodernists and echoes what some scholars have expressed: postmodernism entails “the dissolution of history,” the “killing of history,” “is a visibly deteriorating path to research grants, publication, conferences and academic employment,” and is “[a] menace to serious historical study.” See sections I and II of his introduction, pages 1–­7. Evans quotes American historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, authors of Telling the Truth about History (1995, 1). “Peter Novick nos dice que se escogió el término postmoderno para describir los variados y convergentes ‘asaltos sobre las nociones recibidas de objetivad que recorrieron el mundo académico desde los años sesenta del siglo XX.’” “A la designación postmoderno le ocurriría igual que a otros términos que habían incorporado el prefijo ‘post,’ como ‘postindustrial’ o ‘postestructuralista’: que parecen reflejar ‘el caos, la confusión y la crisis’ que supuestamente sustituyen a las normas convencionales asumidas, pero nadie en realidad ‘tiene una clara concepción de lo que hay en marcha.’” “Al incorporar, cuestionar o ponderar las ideas renovadoras de la historiografía contemporánea y algunos postulados posmodernos sobre la historia, la novela histórica reciente instaura un segundo locus latinoamericano de meditación acerca de la historia. Revisando territorios y objetos históricos viejos y consagrados, o recorriendo y descubriendo zonas desconocidas, inexploradas o borradas, los novelistas dibujan un nuevo mapa para el concepto de la historia y su discurso. Vista desde esta perspectiva, la novela histórica latinoamericana no cancela la historia sino que redefine el espacio declarado como ‘histórico’ por la tradición, la convención y el poder, postulando y configurando en su lugar las historias híbridas que tratan de imaginar otros tiempos, otras posi-​ bilidades, otras historias y discursos.” historical fact/historical fiction  167

24. Estos novelistas “cuentan, pero también piensan, reflexionan sobre la historia y sus caminos.” 25. “Una ficción lograda encarna la subjetividad de una época y por eso las novelas, aunque, cotejadas con la historia, mientan, nos comunican unas verdades huidizas y evanescentes que escapan siempre a los descriptores científicos de la realidad. Sólo la literatura dispone de las técnicas y poderes para destilar ese delicado elixir de la vida: la verdad escondida en el corazón de las mentiras humanas” (Vargas Llosa 2015, 26). Selected Bibliography

Aguiar e Silva, Vítor Manuel de. “El concepto de literatura: La teoría de la literatura” [The concept of literature: The theory of literature]. In Teoría de la literatura [Theory of Literature], 11–­42. Madrid: Gredos, 1986. Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. Telling the Truth about History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Casanova, Julián. “Ficción, verdad, historia: Presentación” [Fiction, truth, history: Presentation]. Historia Social [Social History]50 (2004):3–­6. Conde Sturla, Pedro. “El chivo de Vargas Llosa: una lectura política” [Vargas Llosa’s goat: A political reading]. Literatura​.us, July 30, 2000. http://​www​ .literatura​.us​/pedroconde​/chivo​.html. Crassweller, Robert D. Trujillo: La trágica aventura del poder personal [Trujillo: The life and times of a Caribbean dictator]. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1968. First published 1966 by Macmillan (New York). Diederich, Bernard. Trujillo: La muerte del dictador [Trujillo: The death of the dictator]. Princeton nj: Markus Wiener, 2000. First published 1978 by Fundación Cultural Dominicana (Santo Domingo). Eagleton, Terry. “Introduction: What is Literature?” In Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1–­16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Evans, Richard J. Introduction to In Defense of History, 1–­13. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Gewecke, Frauke. “‘La fiesta del Chivo,’ de Mario Vargas Llosa: Perspectivas de recepción de una novela de éxito” [Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat: Perspectives on the reception of a successful novel]. Iberoamericana 1, no. 3 (2001): 151–­65.

168  Ángel l. estÉvez

Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. Introduction and “The Empiricists.” In The Houses of History. A Critical Reader in History and Theory, 1–­12; 13–­25. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Lefere, Robin. “‘La fiesta del Chivo’: ¿mentira verdadera?” [“The Feast of the Goat”: Truthful lie?]. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 4:331–­38, 2001. Menton, Seymour. La nueva novela histórica de América Latina, 1979–­1992 [Latin America’s new historical novel]. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993; México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. Perkowska, Magdalena. Introduction. In Historias híbridas: La nueva novela histórica latinoamericana (1985–­2000) ante las teorías posmodernas de la historia [Hybrid histories: Latin America’s new historical novel (1985–­2000) before postmodern theories of history],17–­44. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2008. Weldt-­Basson, Helen C. “Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo: History, Fiction, or Social Psychology?” Hispanófila 156 (2009):113–­31. Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. “The Nature of Literature.” In Theory of Literature, 20–­28. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. Vargas Llosa, Mario. La fiesta del Chivo. Cuarta reimpresión. Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S.A.U., 2016. Translated by Edith Grossman as The Feast of the Goat (New York: Picador USA, 2001). —. “La literatura y la vida” [Literature and life]. In La verdad de las mentiras [The truth about lies], 295–­424. Madrid: Santillana, 2002. —. “La verdad de las mentiras” [The truth about lies]. In La verdad de las mentiras [The truth about lies], 15–­32. Barcelona: Penguin Random House, 2015.

historical fact/historical fiction  169

Other Tales

12. Efraín Kristal, Deborah Hartnett, and Carlos Riobó in conversation after the inauguration of the Cátedra. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

c h a p t e r 10

The Storyteller Narrating Latin America from Europe

Carlos Riobó

At its core, Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989) is a novel about displacement, diaspora, and exile. While it is a work recognized by critics as a “jungle novel,” it does not open itself up to the typical trajectory of a novela de la selva, where a protagonist voyages to the heart of darkness, a non-­Western world, presumed to be pristine and innocent, to find himself and heal from the alienation of his modern, industrialized world while preserving the binary of self and other through which colonialism functions. Instead, the protagonist of this novel, a writer, does not feel at home anywhere as he searches for an effective medium through which to narrate his world. The narrative tradition to which El hablador nominally belongs is the novela de la selva, or jungle narrative, a subgenre of the novela de la tierra. This tradition of the regional or autochthonous novel, a rewriting of the Latin American civilización-­barbarie preoccupation, chiefly encompasses works that were published in the first third of the twentieth century—­a moment in literary history when anthropological discourse greatly influenced the arts. Nature and the communities who inhabit rural and even sylvan areas are often the sources of national identity in these early novels of twentieth-­century Latin America. These telluric elements helped writers to construct a distinct literature in the wake of Latin American independence; a literature that was plagued by an anxiety of origins, especially now that new nations were emerging out of the old viceroyalties—­nations that did 173

not necessarily want to trace their beginnings back to Europe. The novela de la selva featured a local sui generis physical space that established the limits of European writing on the non-­Western world. Critics have had mixed reactions to this literary genre. The success of Boom narratives later in the twentieth century cast a pall on this earlier tradition. This is the literary tradition within and counter to which the Latin American Boom’s new novelistic projects were measured by literary critics. In his influential study called the Spanish American Regional Novel (1990), Carlos J. Alonso provides the following illustrative definition: The expression novela de la tierra . . . could be interpreted metaphorically as well to describe the position these works are deemed to occupy in the edifice of contemporary Latin American letters: they are considered to be the coarse, unfinished foundation of the structure, whose principal function is to give support to the building erected on them. This is . . . the manner in which most modern critics have confronted and analyzed these works, endeavoring to identify in them everything that present-­day Latin American literature has transcended, has left behind on its way to achieving its current preeminence. (1990, 38)

Alonso analyzes the inherent discursive tensions between the autochthonous and the contemporary in these regional novels. He goes on to establish how the novela de la tierra “has become consistently characterized as a beginning in the realm of literary history,” but a vestigial beginning that was left behind (1990, 43). The critic Roberto González Echevarría corroborates this view of the regional novel as a literary starting point: “it is about . . . a return—­to the forms handed down by tradition, power, and authority” (1987, 214–­15; my translation).1 Other scholars traditionally have seen the regional novel as presupposing “an origin associated with American ‘mother nature’ and a conscience that mediates between a primitive world and a civilized world” (Méndez Rodenas 1985, 400; my translation).2 There was always already a presumed colonial origin to Latin America itself: in the fifteenth century, the known Far East, as well as the 174 carlos riobÓ

legal contracts entered into between Columbus and the Spanish monarchs prior to his first voyage in 1492 were the preconceived notions on which the identity of the “New World” was based. As González Echevarría asserts, “the jungle narrative constitutes the epic stratum of Spanish American literature, which narrates the origin and evolution of foundational characters and their values” (1987, 227; my translation).3 As for Vargas Llosa himself, he professes to dislike la novela de la selva. We can trace his criticism and dismissal of the genre, which began after he published La casa verde, when he calls the novela de la selva “a symbol of the most common vices of a certain Latin American narrative . . . predominance of the natural order over the social order, picturesqueness, dialectism, descriptive frenzy, horror” (quoted in Rogers 2016, 2; my translation).4 Then, in the early 1990s, “he reiterated his dislike of the genre: ‘I hate the Word “telluric,” brandished by many writers of the time as maximum literary virtue and obligation of every Peruvian writer. . . . The word “telluric” has come to be for me the emblem of provincialism and underdevelopment in the field of literature’” (Rogers 2016, 2; my translation).5 Although Vargas Llosa seems to reject this genre because he sees it as a sort of straightjacket that does not allow Latin American writers (Peruvians, in particular) to stray from commonplaces and stereotypes, he certainly uses it several times himself and very successfully at that. He clearly exploits the benefits of jungle narratives in works such as La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968), Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), El hablador, El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012), and others. While the early writers of novelas de la selva were able to find their origins, their way back home after the break with European national identity, for Vargas Llosa in El hablador, the jungle proves ungovernable and, ultimately, alienating. El hablador begins with the anonymous main character, who is clearly based on a biographical sketch of Vargas Llosa himself, in Florence, Italy, having fled from the sociopolitical problems of his native Peru. This exile is self-­imposed and, from the very beginning, seems more like an adoptive home than a place of exile. the storyteller   175

As the novel opens, the first-­person narrator says, “I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while, and suddenly my unfortunate country forced itself upon me this morning in the most unexpected way” (1989, 3).6 We never learn the narrator’s name, but he obviously shares many similarities with Vargas Llosa himself and his biography. The narrator positions himself not as an outsider in Florence, but as someone who feels a great degree of comfort there and whose alienation is from his homeland, Peru. As he starts the novel with the Spanish word vine (I came) instead of fui (I went), we understand that he is looking out at the world from Florence. Furthermore, the fact that he uses the city’s Italian name, Firenze, and not Florencia in Spanish locates the place of enunciation within Italy, within Europe. Peru (and Latin America by extension) and its people are things to be forgotten. The narrator tells us that he is in Florence in order to forget them as well as that unfortunate country. Ineluctably, it would seem, however, he cannot shake Peru, as he finds it has been essentialized and fetishized in photos and in popular cultural reenactments for tourists in Italy, as we will explore in greater detail shortly. While in Florence, our narrator comes across Peru first in photos, shortly after visiting Dante’s house. It is significant that it is Dante’s reconstructed abode, “la reconstruida casa de Dante” (7). This narrator seems to be denied access to origins and must settle for reconstructions. It is also significant that he should speak of Florence and Dante within the first two sentences of the novel. Dante, of course, was famously exiled from Florence. These two figures—­the city and the poet—­are inextricably tied to the notion of exile and of losing one’s home. Dante’s exile from Florence was in large part due to the political vicissitudes of his day. The changing fortunes of the Guelphs and Ghibellines and then the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs eventually landed Dante in permanent exile from his beloved Florence. His vengeance would be both linguistic and literary. His Divina Commedia was written in his Florentine vernacular and not in the official political language of Latin. Our anonymous protagonist in El hablador is also in a self-­imposed exile 176 carlos riobÓ

of sorts, from Peru. At the time Vargas Llosa was writing this work, Peru was actually experiencing many problems—­in the 1980s there were armed internal conflicts in the country, so when the fictional writer says he is trying to “olvidar[s]e por un tiempo del Perú . . . el malhadado país” [forget Peru for a while . . . my unfortunate country], the words actually ring with historical veracity (7). We have seen that Dante reacted to his exile by creating a linguistic world that re-­created Florence for him. He used a Florentine vernacular in his Commedia as an antidote to exile. Similarly, our narrator in El hablador attempts to search for the essence of Peru in its indigenous peoples, specifically the Machiguenga, and their vernacular language. One of the most salient features of this novel is its alternating narratives: the criollo discourse and the Machiguenga tales. The unexpected interwoven modalities, a diachronic narrative and a synchronic story, are at first jarring to the reader, but then are understood as part of a whole. Language is a central preoccupation in Vargas Llosa’s novel. It is a medium through which identity is both constituted and expressed. The narrator plays with language starting with chapter 1 of El hablador. We have already seen his use of the Spanish verb vine and the toponym “Firenze.” By the end of that same chapter, he includes more and more Italian and even resorts to mixing registers as he portrays himself as a more Italianized Peruvian. We read “Mr. Malfatti is dead,” written completely in Italian (my translation).7 In the following paragraph, the narrator throws in the Italian word forse (the English “perhaps”), gratuitously and with no translation, at the end of a sentence: “A virus he’d caught in the jungle, [perhaps]” (1989, 6).8 Similarly, the narrator gratuitously sprinkles Italian expressions, untranslated, in the following sentence of the same paragraph: “And now, [she was sorry], but it was [the lunch hour] and she had to close” (1989, 7).9 Although there are other comparable examples of this linguistic mixture of Italian and Spanish throughout the novel, these suffice to make the point that we are dealing with a narrator with an affinity for Italian culture who is trying to forget his own life in the developing world, his “malhadado país.” the storyteller   177

In fact, the entire first chapter and the beginning of the final chapter of El habador are set in Florence, Italy—­symbol of the European Renaissance and arguably the center of European culture. Latin America is seen through a European lens here, literally, as Gabriele Malfatti’s camera has captured the Machiguenga. This novel is framed by Florence and Dante, and by the photographic images of indigenous Peruvians taken by an Italian. Toward the end of El hablador, the narrator hears that there are “Inca” musicians performing in a local square in Florence only to find out that they are Portuguese and Bolivians producing a hodgepodge of musical genres. For Europe, Latin America is exotic and interchangeable. The novel’s narrator’s interest in his own country’s indigenous people is piqued by Malfatti’s photo exhibit in Florence. This triggers in him an almost obsessive need to try to reconstruct their oral tradition, as we will explore later. The complicated notion of homeland and diaspora are embodied in the character Saúl Zuratas, better known as Mascarita (little mask) for the large dark birthmark that covers much of his face. He is the narrator’s best friend in Lima and the person the narrator convinces himself has become the new “hablador,” as captured in Malfatti’s photos. Mascarita’s father is Jewish and he has brought up his son with knowledge of his religion and culture: “He, on the other hand, had to sit out his Saturdays in the synagogue, hours and hours, swallowing his yawns and pretending to be interested in the rabbi’s sermon—­not understanding one word—­so as not to disappoint his father” (1989, 9).10 Mascarita is Jewish and, on his mother’s side, Catholic. He represents the problem of trying to belong to a nation. The topic of making aliyah to Israel (moving to Israel under that country’s Law of Return) and what that country represents for someone such as Mascarita is also discussed in the novel. After our narrator last sees Mascarita, he is under the assumption that he and his father have moved to Israel. Aliyah becomes a symbol of the return from exile, but also of competing national and cultural loyalties. El hablador’s narrator encountered the Peruvian Amazon jungle and some of its people for the first time while he was a student at San Marcos 178 carlos riobÓ

University in Lima. He accompanied an expedition by the Instituto Lingüístico de verano (summer Linguistic Institute), run by the Schneils, husband and wife linguists who were interested in both conducting ethnographic research and evangelizing. The narrator’s first impression of the indigenous world is that of moving backward in time: “When we reached the tribes . . . there before us was prehistory” (1989, 73).11 He is struck by the realization that Peru also was just like that: “This, too, was Peru, and only then did I become fully aware of it: a world still untamed, the Stone Age, magico-­religious cultures, polygamy, head shrinking . . . that is to say, the dawn of human history” (1989, 73).12 Our narrator suddenly has a visceral understanding of Peru as a place lacking modernity and civilization. Perhaps this is why this novel opens and closes in Florence—­a perch from which to define what is civilized and what is not. His distance from his own country seems to do the trick and finally inspires our narrator to write his Machiguenga narrative. Ever since his college days, when he became preoccupied with the Machiguenga and with habladores (storytellers) through his own visit to the jungle and conversations with Mascarita and the Schneils, he attempted, fruitlessly, to write a story about their world and about their rhapsode of sorts: Ever since my unsuccessful attempts in the early sixties at writing about the Machiguenga storytellers, the subject had never been far from my mind. It returned every now and then, like an old love, not quite dead coals yet, whose embers would suddenly burst into flame. I had gone on taking notes and scribbling rough drafts that I invariably tore up. And reading, every time I could lay my hands on them, the papers and articles about Machiguengas that kept appearing here and there in scientific journals. . . . But never in any of these contemporary works had I found any information whatsoever about storytellers. Oddly enough, all reference to them broke off around the fifties. (1989, 156–­57)13

Ironically, the narrator cannot find an adequate narrative discourse through which to write about the world of the jungle while he is in the jungle or the storyteller   179

in Peru itself. He must leave the developing world in order to be able to understand it better and to be more a part of it. He needs to be in a state of displacement, exile—­even if self-­imposed, away from his home’s political upheaval and third-­world discomforts, to find an appropriate narrative style for his story. As a Peruvian criollo in the novel, he was very self-­conscious about having any proximity to the jungle. He experienced the ambivalence that is typical of Latin Americans: are they Western or not? Is indigenous culture part of their modern culture or not? Our narrator finds it much easier to understand the jungle from his positioning in Europe. He questions his inability to arrive at the right narrative formula: Why, in the course of all those years, had I been unable to write my story about storytellers? The answer I used to offer myself, each time I threw the half-­finished manuscript of that elusive story into the wastebasket, was the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellectual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-­religious mentality would go about telling a story. All my attempts led each time to the impasse of style that struck me as glaringly false, as implausible as the various ways in which philosophers and novelists of the Enlightenment had put words into the mouths of their exotic characters in the eighteenth century, when the theme of the “noble savage” was fashionable in Europe. (1989, 158)14

Now, in Florence, away from Peru and the jungle, paradoxically he is able to craft his story. When readers first read El hablador, we are struck by the sharp narrative differences between the first two chapters and chapter 3. At this point, a very different story unfolds, one that is clearly not following narrative or diachronic historical time schemes. The use of synchronic sequencing, what are presumably indigenous words, and mythic discursive patterns signal an oral narrative unlike what we were reading until chapter 3. At first this is disorienting and confusing for the reader—­especially because the 180 carlos riobÓ

word “hablador” has not been mentioned in the novel yet—­but at some point along the way, readers assume that the novel is weaving together Western and Machiguenga (non-­Western) storytelling. We first read the term “hablador” in the next chapter, number 4. And, although chapter 5 identifies the narrator of the Machiguenga stories as an “hablador,” it is only at the novel’s climax that readers are told that the second narrator is Mascarita. But is the second narrator actually Saúl Zuratas? We do read certain clues in the Machiguenga narrative that lead us to believe that Mascarita is the “hablador.” The storyteller narrates a parable about the plight of those with birth defects in Machiguenga and other cultures. His own deformity makes us think of Mascarita’s giant birthmark right away. Furthermore, the storyteller has a parrot that accompanies him. Saúl Zuratas also had a parrot for a pet. In terms of the content of the story, the Machiguenga “hablador” tells us a tale very similar to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Mascarita’s favorite work (a work about human transformation and irrational occurrences). Lastly, throughout part of the Machiguenga narrative, we read Judeo-­Christian stories of persecution, both Jewish and Christian, not unlike the narratives Saúl discusses throughout the novel. We may now return to the beginning of El hablador to finish analyzing the genesis of our Machiguenga narrative. In Florence, the narrator is bewitched by the image of what he believes to be a storyteller in a photograph. He believes, furthermore, that the storyteller is his friend, Mascarita. Actually, he has no proof that either one of these ideas is true, but he decides to imagine that they are: “I have decided that it is he who is the storyteller in Malfatti’s photograph. A personal decision, since objectively I have no way of knowing. . . . After turning the pieces of the puzzle around and around many times and shuffling them this way and that, I see they fit. They outline a more or less coherent story” (1989, 241).15 This chance encounter with the native culture that defines Peru to the European, Western world, while in the heart of that Western world, triggers the narrator’s imagination and his ability to write the Machiguenga narrative at which he had failed for so long. the storyteller   181

The framing of Peruvian indigenous culture through a European lens, literally through the camera of Malfatti, allows the narrator to see it in a way that makes sense to him. This view, however, contains a colonial a priori that defines Latin America as a jungle world that is pre-­modern—­ Malfatti’s European gaze. This is the world of the jungle narrative that Vargas Llosa himself says he dislikes so much, as we saw earlier, because it straightjackets Peruvian writers into writing about the land and the developing world and not about the same concerns that the Western world has. Our narrator needs to create the interceding figure of the storyteller—­a person who is Jewish and criollo, as well as a Machiguenga. Only through this mask (“mascarita”) can he narrate Peru for the world: “The answer I used to offer myself, each time I threw the half-­finished manuscript of that elusive story into the wastebasket, was the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellectual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-­religious mentality would go about telling a story” (1989, 157–­58).16 The narrator can now create a narrative vehicle through which he can use his ventriloquist’s dummy—­Saúl Zuratas—­to tell the European world about Latin America, from a criollo perspective. This is the true meaning of Vargas Llosa’s El hablador. It is his projection of a failed Latin American writer who thinks he has found the remedy to his writer’s block in Europe. He believes that to narrate Peru he must find a way of doing it that will be magically real to Europeans. He thereby uncovers the prejudice that subtends jungle narratives: the a priori, the always already colonial discourse that does not allow the urban, Westernized cultures of Latin America to be recognized, because they do not fit the preconceived notion of what Latin America is or should be. To the Florentines, for example (and to the other European tourists milling about), it does not matter whether the local “Inca combo” (1989, 238) are actually Peruvians or “two Bolivians and two Portuguese from Rome” (1989, 238); or whether they are actually playing “Peruvian music on traditional instruments” (1989, 238) or whether they “were trying out 182 carlos riobÓ

an incompatible synthesis of Portuguese fados and Santa Cruz carnival music” (1989, 238).17 El hablador is a novel about the narrative crisis that faces Latin Americans like Vargas Llosa himself toward the end of the twentieth century: how do Latin American writers narrate their own experiences of Latin America to the world? Instead, these writers from the “developing world” (not to mention “third world”) feel obliged to rehearse the same old “incompatible synthesis,” as the Inca combo above does, which will seem authentic to the outside world, but which is based on a simulacrum of Latin American reality that is already inscribed in how Europe sees Latin America and what it expects Latin Americans to be. The anonymous narrator is whipsawed, as he cannot write in his own country (Peru is beset with military, economic, and social crises in the late twentieth century), yet he cannot authentically express his reality to the outside world either. His solution is to adopt the persona of the diasporic and hybrid Mascarita, which will allow him to be both Western and non-­Western, participant-­observer and native informant. Vargas Llosa represents the general agony of narrative representation in the West in this novel. The added twist goes beyond the twentieth century’s crisis of authenticity and intellectual authority. El hablador truly is about storytelling. It is about the difficulties that exist in being able to self-­identify as modern, urban, and Western in Latin America. This is why our narrator is rambling through Florence as the novel opens, in search of the father of a narrative vernacular—­Dante. Dante, too, was in exile from his beloved homeland, yet he managed to develop a vernacular literary idiom that transcended the crisis of representation in his time. While it would seem that our narrator is able to do the same through his ruse of Mascarita, in the end, he cannot remove the traces of his Western identity (Kafka, Jews, Jesus Christ, and the like) from his Machiguenga story as he tries to embody “the storyteller.” This is why El hablador ends with our narrator wandering aimlessly through the menacing bowels of a sweltering Florence, unable to get the voice of the storyteller, “unceasing, crackling, immemorial” out of his head (1989, 246).18 He has become yet another the storyteller   183

late twentieth-­century Latin American writer trapped in the cultural labyrinth of Europe with no clear way out, except to follow the siren’s song of the telluric novel into his own head. Notes

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

All quotes in English of Vargas Llosa’s El hablador come from his The Storyteller, translated by Helen Lane, 1989. “se trata . . . de un regreso . . . a las formas legadas por la tradición, por el poder y la autoridad.” “un origen asociado con la ‘madre-­naturaleza’ americana y una conciencia mediadora entre mundo primitivo y mundo civilizado.” “La novela de la selva constituye el estrato épico de la literatura hispanoame-​ ricana, lo que relata el origen y evolución de los personajes de fundación y sus valores.” “símbolo de los vicios más comunes a cierta narrativa latinoamericana . . . predominio del orden natural sobre el social, pintoresquismo, dialectismo, frenesí descriptivo, truculencia.” “he reiterated his dislike of the genre: ‘Odio la palabra “telúrico,” blandido por muchos escritores de la época como máxima virtud literaria y obligación de todo escritor peruano . . . La palabra “telúrico” llega a ser para mí el emblema del provincialismo y el subdesarrollo en el campo de la literatura.’” “vine a Firenze para olvidarme por un tiempo del Perú y de los peruanos y he aquí que el malhadado país me salió al encuentro esta mañana de la manera más inesperada” (1987, 7). “Il signore Gabriele Malfatti è morto” (1987, 10). “Un virus contraído en aquellas selvas, forse” (1987, 10; emphasis mine). “Y, ahora, le dispiaceva, pero era la hora del pranzo y tenía que cerrar” (1987, 10; emphasis mine). “Él . . . tenía que zambullirse los sábados en la sinagoga, horas y horas, aguantando los bostezos y fingiendo interesarse por los sermones del rabino—­que no entendía ni jota—­para no decepcionar a su padre . . .” (1987, 12). “Cuando llegábamos a las tribus . . . tocábamos la prehistoria” (1987, 71). “También eso era el Perú y solo entonces tomaba yo cabal conciencia de ello: un mundo todavía sin domar, la Edad de Piedra, las culturas mágico-­religiosas, la poligamia, la reducción de cabezas . . . , es decir, el despuntar de la historia humana” (1987, 71–­72).

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13. “Desde mis frustrados intentos a comienzos de los años sesenta de escribir una historia sobre los habladores machiguengas, el tema había seguido siempre rondándome. Volvía, cada cierto tiempo, como un viejo amor nunca apagado del todo, cuyas brasas se encienden de pronto en una llamarada. Había seguido tomando notas y garabateando borradores que invariablemente rompía. Y leyendo, cada vez que lograba ponerles la mano encima, los estudios y artículos que iban apareciendo, aquí y allá, en revistas científicas, sobre los machiguengas. . . . Pero nunca, en ninguno de estos trabajos contemporáneos, encontré la menor información sobre los habladores. Curiosamente, las referencias a ellos se interrumpían hacia los años cincuenta” (1987, 151). 14. “¿Por qué había sido incapaz en el curso de todos aquellos años, de escribir mi relato sobre los habladores? La respuesta que me solía dar, vez que despachaba a la basura el manuscrito medio hacer de aquella huidiza historia, era la dificultad que significaba inventar, en español y dentro de esquemas intelectuales lógicos, una forma literaria que verosímilmente sugiriese la manera de contar de un hombre primitivo, de mentalidad mágico-­religiosa. Todos mis intentos culminaban siempre en un estilo que me parecía tan obviamente fraudulento, tan poco persuasivo como aquellos en los que, en el siglo XVIII, cuando se puso de moda en Europa el ‘buen salvaje,’ hacían hablar a sus personajes exóticos los filósofos y novelistas de la Ilustración” (1987, 152). 15. “He decidido que el hablador de la fotografía de Malfatti sea él. Pues, objetivamente, no tengo manera de saberlo. . . . Después de darles muchas vueltas y combinarlas unas con otras, las piezas del rompecabezas casan, Delinean una historia más o menos coherente . . .” (1987, 230). 16. “La respuesta que me solía dar, cada vez que despachaba a la basura el manuscrito a medio hacer de aquella huidiza historia, era la dificultad que significaba inventar, en español y dentro de esquemas intelectuales lógicos, una forma literaria que verosímilmente sugiriese la manera de contar de un hombre primitivo, de mentalidad mágico-­religiosa” (1987, 152). 17. “Inca combo”: “conjunto de Incas” (1987, 227); “two Bolivians and two Portuguese from Rome”: “dos bolivianos y dos portugueses de Roma” (1987, 227); “Peruvian music on traditional instruments”: “música peruana con instrumentos típicos” (1987, 227); “were trying out an incompatible synthesis of Portuguese fados and Santa Cruz carnival music”: “ensayaban una incompatible mescolanza de fado y carnavalitos cruceños” (1987, 227–­28). the storyteller   185

18. “sin pausas, crepitante, inmemorial” (1987, 235). Selected Bibliography

Alonso, Carlos J. The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. González Echevarría, Roberto. La ruta de Severo Sarduy [Severo Sarduy’s route]. Hanover nh: Ediciones del Norte, 1987. Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. 1985. “Severo Sarduy: Colibrí.” Reseña. Revista Iberoamericana 51, nos. 130–­31 (1985): 399–­401. Rogers, Charlotte. “Mario Vargas Llosa and the novela de la selva.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2016): 1–­18. Vargas Llosa, Mario. El hablador. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987. Translated by Helen Lane as The Storyteller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

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c h a p t e r 11

Rubén Darío through Mario Vargas Llosa’s Looking Glass Raquel Chang-­R odríguez

Rubén Darío (1867–­1916) is the leading figure of Modernismo and its preeminent representative of the revitalization of poetry and prose in Spanish at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In 2016 we marked the hundredth anniversary of his death in León, Nicaragua. Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) is one of the most admired and widely read novelists in both Hispanic and world literature. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Both authors have in common a deserved renown and a sense of urgency in their writing, as they use language to develop their ideas about the people and events that awaken their curiosity, anger, or reflection. Darío does exactly this in Opiniones (1906), where he expounds on Zola, Gorki, and Isadora Duncan and expresses his thoughts on such subjects as girl prodigies and social-­climbing foreigners. Vargas Llosa’s book El pez en el agua (1993; A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, 1994) also comes to mind, a chronicle of the Peruvian presidential campaign of 1990 featuring a parade of corrupt, fawning, opportunistic figures, a gallery of types recognizable anywhere and portrayed here with irony, humor, and spite. Because of the importance of both writers and the anniversary of Darío’s death recently marked, I propose considering Darío through Vargas Llosa’s reflections as expressed in his undergraduate thesis presented at the National University of San Marcos in Lima in 1958. In El pez en el agua, Vargas Llosa explains how, in a seminar taught by Luis Alberto Sánchez in 1956, he discovered “the essential and unconventional 187

13. Mario Vargas Llosa with Raquel and Eugenio Chang-­Rodríguez at ccny before the Doctor of Letters honoris causa ceremony. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

Darío, the founder of modern poetry in Spanish” (1994, 394).1 Vargas Llosa’s enthusiasm was such that he ran to the library afterward to read and reread the works mentioned in class (1994, 394). I connect the two writers by turning virtually to Peru, to the National University of San Marcos, to its quintessential meeting place, the Patio de Letras, to Vargas Llosa’s youth, and especially to the thesis that the future novelist presented to the Faculty of Letters and Sciences in 1958 when he was twenty-­two years old. That college exercise is titled Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío (Bases for an interpretation of Rubén Darío) and was published in 2001 by the National University of 188  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

San Marcos when the distinguished student’s alma mater granted him an honorary doctorate.2 Divided into five chapters, followed by a conclusion and a bibliography, the thesis does not address the modernist poet’s work in its entirety. Rather, like Edelberto Torres’s biography of Darío (1952), it focuses on how the author of Azul developed his style, emphasizing Darío’s contradictory judgments and shifting positions. It is interesting to study the main aspects of this early exercise, as much for Vargas Llosa’s comments on Darío’s literary beginnings as for what we can glean from these observations about Vargas Llosa’s vocation, which, like Darío’s, became evident very early on. Of equal importance is the historic moment at the end of the nineteenth century when Darío emerged as a writer and, moreover, as a writer notably connected to journalism at a moment when newspapers played a role in the professionalization of writers and their relationship (or lack thereof) to money and society. It is worth noting another common point in the trajectory of both writers: both used journalism to present ideas and explain their historical moment. Early Vacillation

When Vargas Llosa discusses Darío’s first artistic phase, he characterizes it correctly as indecisive. He justifies his assessment by noting the enthusiasm with which Darío welcomes aesthetics from different traditions and languages, in prose as well as verse. Among the principal authors Darío admires in Spanish are José de Espronceda and Ramón de Campoamor, and, to a lesser degree, Manuel José Quintana, Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Ricardo Palma, and Salvador Díaz Mirón; however, the influence of all these authors on his work was fleeting (2001, 52). In this first phase, beginning in 1882, the French writers Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, François Coppée, and Catulle Mendès also had an influence on Darío. Vargas Llosa highlights these inconsistencies, noting a statement Darío made about Gautier in 1886 when he declares Gautier to be “the best stylist” (2001, 53) in France.3 However, Vargas Llosa observes, Darío apparently had forgotten that months before he had said the same thing about Coppée and Mendès (2001, 53–­54). Meanwhile, Darío’s short story darÍo through vargas llosa’s looking glass  189

“Las albóndigas del coronel” (The colonel’s meatballs) was influenced by Peruvian tradicionista Ricardo Palma, whom the Nicaraguan poet met in 1888 when Palma was director of the National Library of Peru and Darío was passing through Lima on his way back to Central America after his stay in Chile. Again, Vargas Llosa uses this early admiration to emphasize the short-­lived nature of Darío’s tastes. Darío would later observe that a “tradición,” referring to Palma’s style in his short narratives, “is the flower of Lima,” but when imitated by others “it has little perfume . . . a lack of color” (2001, 55).4 A number of Darío’s stories correspond to this phase of stylistic uncertainty (1881–­87), as Vargas Llosa explains: for example, “Mis primeros versos” (My first verses), an autobiographical story; “Historia de un picaflor” (The story of a hummingbird), an imagistic story; and “El pájaro azul” (The blue bird), a story marked by sentimentalism. It is not Vargas Llosa’s objective to show the influence of Darío’s readings on his work, but rather the inner drama of a “young” author—­a drama Vargas Llosa surely experienced himself in those formative years—­as well as to emphasize the “intensity” with which the Nicaraguan embraces these literary lessons, as is shown, for example, by the speed with which his preferences disappear from sight (2001, 58). Vargas Llosa also was developing as an author at this point, so his commentary about how a writer achieves his own style is revealing about his ideas and ambitions: those writers who “do not get beyond the stage of simple assimilation of influences . . . are those we know as minor or mediocre poets. . . . An author is born when he leaves behind that learning by which authors other than himself write through his pen” (2001, 57–­58).5 This judgment does not imply that one should reject other writers’ influence; on the contrary, Vargas Llosa wonders how William Faulkner would have written had he not read James Joyce. He affirms, however, the need to assimilate one’s readings and appropriate influences with the purpose of creating one’s own literary arsenal. According to the young critic, for Darío—­like others—­this occurs when the Nicaraguan “assumes a personal, nontransferable stance toward reality, one not copied from any other author or book” (2001, 58).6 190  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

Émile Zola and Valparaíso

According to Vargas Llosa, this phase of inconsistency took an unexpected turn when Darío moved to Valparaíso in 1887 and there became familiar with Zola and naturalism. It is worth noting that new French literature first arrived at this southern Pacific port before moving on to the Chilean capital, Santiago, and other major cities. Carlos Franz brings up this phenomenon in his essay about George Sand, “La emancipadora” (2016), where he discusses how the polyglot Chilean writer Carmen Arriagada (1807–­1900) reacted to reading Sand’s novel Lélia, published in 1833. Following Sand’s example—­recall her correspondence with Chopin—­ Arriagada writes long letters to her absent lover, the German painter Mauricio Rugendas (1802–­58), describing her longing and passion for him in detail. Through this kind of transoceanic commerce in books as well as exchanges with friends, Darío encountered Zola’s work and the precepts of naturalism. Equally important at this stage was Darío’s contact with port workers in Valparaíso and his life of poverty there. Vargas Llosa qualifies both experiences as “seminal,” and Darío used them shortly after in his story “El fardo” (The bale). In this story, the Nicaraguan writer gathers the necessary elements for a naturalistic narrative, from the port city’s filthy streets to its hungry characters. However, the story, in Vargas Llosa’s assessment, fails on an emotional level because the author describes its “setting with the same impassive coldness with which the surgeon manipulates the corpse on which he conducts an autopsy . . . [Darío] sees there only a pretext to write” (2001, 68).7 Later, Vargas Llosa compares this exercise in naturalism with the tradicionista influence mentioned above—­in the former, Darío imitates Zola, and in the latter, Palma. In “El fardo” and “Las albóndigas del coronel,” Vargas Llosa notes, Darío uses the circumstances of the fisherman and his family and the legend of Colonel Arrechavala respectively, “as if he were a lifeless leech, using them as a simple pretext to write” (2001, 70).8 Then Vargas Llosa cites Raimundo Lida’s comment that Darío distances himself from the “linguistic inertia” associated with naturalism and puts his own stamp on the story. As such, for Vargas Llosa, darÍo through vargas llosa’s looking glass  191

“El fardo” strays far from its original purpose of denunciation because its author could not resist the wordplay and complicated metaphors that detract from the fishermen’s drama. Vargas Llosa summarizes: “The story of Uncle Lucas is not able to arouse indignation or compassion: it only amuses or entertains. And . . . naturalism, condemned that literature which sought only to amuse or delight” (2001, 72).9 However, through those flirtations with naturalism, Vargas Llosa concludes, Darío refines his vocation and style. He cannot approach and test reality scientifically as Zola and his followers propose because, for Darío, reality provides a pretext to write and display his mastery of form (2001, 73). Through this example, Vargas Llosa recognizes how the encounter with and collision of dissimilar literary influences can help catalyze an author’s ultimate preferences. Divergent and contradictory readings, the young critic notes, define an author’s formation and, perhaps strangely, contribute to the development of his style. Youthful Similarities

Vargas Llosa examines Darío’s biography and the peculiar circumstances of his birth and childhood to show them as digressions from his life trajectory as much as moments in the awakening of his vocation. Darío’s mother, Rosa Sarmiento, was orphaned young and raised by her aunt, Bernarda Sarmiento; the family forced her to marry Manuel Darío García, a second cousin known for his fondness for alcohol, women, and revelry, whom the family hoped to redeem through this marriage. Treated poorly by her husband, the young Rosa, who was already pregnant, sought refuge with her aunt and uncle (Bernarda Sarmiento and her husband, Colonel Félix Ramírez Madregil) and gave birth to Rubén. However, she would later run away from their home. Under varying circumstances, Rubén grew up believing he was his aunt and uncle’s son and called his uncle father, and his true father uncle. Years later, his mother burst back into his life, and the child became aware of the truth; however, he continued to live and act as if he did not know. According to Vargas Llosa, at this point the boy “would begin to see others and himself differently . . . he lives a 192  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

fiction” (2001, 79).10 Vargas Llosa also notes that these experiences gave birth to the “startled, tortured spirit” that would mark much of Darío’s work (2001, 79).11 Through Vargas Llosa’s study of this conflict—­one that was not too different from his own life with his own confrontation with a father whom he believed to be dead and who one day reappeared to tyrannize him—­the young critic seeks “the explanation for Darío’s closed, intransigent individualism . . . a fundamental characteristic of Darío and his work” (80).12 Marked at a very early age by these circumstances, the child Darío—­who was also a little sickly, Vargas Llosa adds—­knows himself to be different and seeks refuge in reading and in playing the accordion; he writes prose and verse and acquires a reputation as a “child prodigy” (2001, 84).13 The newspaper La verdad de León invites him to be a contributor, and since it belongs to the political opposition, as Darío later notes, he attempts to imitate the rhetoric of the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo (2001, 84). The young poet, Vargas Llosa clarifies, does not write out of conviction or to signal social decline; if the circumstances had so demanded it, his articles and poems would have been molded to them. Interestingly, we find another connection here in the trajectory of both authors who both seek refuge from their personal drama in reading and creativity. Vargas Llosa adds that in this phase of intellectual growth and the broadening of his intellectual circle, Darío perfects his skill in meter, reads profusely, and writes on commission about a wide variety of topics. By age fifteen, he becomes Nicaragua’s most admired poet (2001, 87). With respect to an experience he also shares with Darío, Vargas Llosa explains: “Literature, which saved Darío from solitude, which established his distinctiveness, leading him to occupy a notably different, singular position in a very short time, is an exercise for him, a formal concern” (2001, 92).14 Even if the poet is not completely aware of it, his interests lead him to identify formal excellence with literary beauty. In contrast to Vargas Llosa’s Sartrean, committed vision, for Darío, the mission of the writer—­according to Vargas Llosa—­is that of devoting all one’s efforts to achieving beauty, because the artist is the only person capable of discovering it, of noticing darÍo through vargas llosa’s looking glass  193

its signs and capturing them in his art. For Vargas Llosa, Recaredo, a character in “La muerte de la emperatriz de la China” (The death of the empress of China), exemplifies the modernist poet’s idealistic attitude (2001, 93). Recaredo is later characterized by Darío as a lover of his art who possesses “the passion for form.”15 According to Vargas Llosa, Darío’s flirtations with Zola and naturalism ultimately would help him reject their ideas and embrace an aestheticist literary posture. Vargas Llosa concurs with Darío’s own assessment in El viaje a Nicaragua e Historia de mis libros (1919; Voyage to Nicaragua and the Story of my Books): “‘El fardo’ was the immediate reflection of reading Zola, but as the style did not correspond to my temperament or to my fantasy, I did not stray again” (2001, 106, emphasis by Vargas Llosa).16 Thus, Vargas Llosa explains how the exercise in reading and writing exemplified in this story helped the artist to refine his vocation and send his art in a more precious direction, one very different from that admired by the young critic from San Marcos and later captured in his first great novel, La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966). Consolidation of an Aesthetic

After May 1887, the Nicaraguan writer began to publish in Chilean newspapers, especially La Época of Santiago and El Heraldo of Valparaíso; these were primarily stories—­for example, “El rey burgués” (The bourgeois king), “El velo de la reina Mab” (Queen Mab’s veil), “El rubí” (The ruby), “El sátiro sordo” (The deaf satyr)—­whose formal and conceptual unity demonstrate a coherent style. As Vargas Llosa explains at the beginning of his thesis, at this point “the Darío we know appears . . . a writer with conviction, who freely assumes the commitment that he has made with himself, and who writes in accordance with it, in an admirable style” (2001, 108).17 These stories, collected later in Azul (1888)—­which for Vargas Llosa was Darío’s first “authentic” book, as well as the “official beginning” of Modernismo—­reveal Darío’s commitment to beauty, exclude social responsibility, and bring to a close his previous stage of stylistic vacillation (2001, 108). Vargas Llosa adds that Darío alone is 194  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

responsible for his choices: “he would bear the burden” of his decision, just as before he had borne “the drama of his childhood” (2001, 109).18 The resolution of Darío’s initial dilemma, along with his talent, gave “unity and greatness to his work” (2001, 109).19 Without discounting poetry—­his admiration for Góngora and César Moro, as well as his preface to Kavafis’s erotic poems are well known—­Vargas Llosa emphasizes Darío’s prose because it is through this genre that “the writer is more visible.”20 That is, the writer can clearly demonstrate his commitment to an aesthetic (109–­10). According to Vargas Llosa, even if the French Parnassians and Symbolists gave Darío technical resources, the content, feeling, and morals in Azul all belong to the Nicaraguan, a writer committed to the essentiality of form. For Vargas Llosa, Darío’s repudiation of Abrojos (Thistles), his first book, published in 1887, is particularly revealing because the Nicaraguan author characterized it in terms of “lived poems” and “solace” (2001, 111).21 The young critic notes how the poems in this collection reveal the writer’s confrontation with a reality marked by misery, anguish, scarcity, dishonesty, a setting in which beauty and the ideals he chases are absent. Vargas Llosa characterizes the work as a “testimony of disenchantment” (2001, 112).22 He contends that this organizing theme puts its stamp on the collection, as the prologue-­dedication demonstrates: Yes, I have written these Thistles after great insult and pains, now with a laugh on my lips, now with a tear in my eyes. (112)23 Abrojos distances itself from social criticism, as Vargas Llosa observes. Rather, in this collection, Darío pours out “his experience into poetry” (116).24 In Azul, the poet has chosen his path: he lives in the world but has the option to ignore it, to not refer to it, standing in evident contrast with Vargas Llosa’s aesthetic in which the re-­creation of reality with a corrective aim predominates. Darío distances himself from the objective in his second book through the fantasy represented by the color blue. darÍo through vargas llosa’s looking glass  195

The Chilean critic Eduardo de la Barra wrote a prologue to this collection of eighteen stories and seven poems when it was first published in Valparaíso. However, there was a central characteristic of the work, Vargas Llosa adds, that De la Barra ignored: he reproaches the author for the book’s excessive elegance—­for its characters constantly dressed up “in finery” (2001, 121).25 Vargas Llosa wonders whether Darío sought to be naturalistic, and then answers his own question in the negative and reminds us of the omission of this prologue in later editions of Azul. According to the Peruvian author, De la Barra’s observations displeased Darío for their lack of comprehension of the new aesthetic that promoted escape through imagination and language (2001, 121). As the artist re-­created the world, its situations, and its characters through the word, art stopped being “an ensemble of rules” and instead became a “harmony of caprices” (2001, 124).26 When Vargas Llosa acknowledges the novelty of Azul and Darío’s talent, he ponders the arbitrariness of art and at the same time praises creative liberty—­the right of each writer to shape his or her work to their own taste. Zola, a Permanent Presence

Darío was living in El Salvador when, in 1890, a coup ended the government of his friend, protector, and president, General Francisco Menéndez (1887–­1890). Subsequently, Darío found himself obliged to leave the country. Afterward, as Vargas Llosa explains, the Nicaraguan expressed his desire to write “new stories” whose style would adhere more closely to reality. He writes half a dozen stories in which he criticizes betrayal and violence and condemns war. As a whole, these stories show a final and not very sustained effort to reconnect with reality. However, Vargas Llosa observes, the figure of Zola has not entirely disappeared from the modernist’s writings; rather, Zola keeps appearing in Darío’s essays and short commentaries on Zola’s work and the mission of naturalism. Thus, Darío “is born to literature . . . by rebelling against Zola, taking sides against him, and he reaches the height of his powers by insolently contesting and challenging him” (2001, 152).27 For all that, however, “intimately, secretly, Darío kept ties with Zola” (2001, 152).28 196  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

This ambiguous relationship culminates in an essay written on the occasion of Zola’s death in 1902. When Zola died, Darío was in Paris and attended his funeral. He later set down his impressions in an article published in the collection Opiniones where, in Vargas Llosa’s words, Darío wrote “the greatest tribute he ever wrote about any author,” including those whose aesthetic vision was very close to his (2001, 153).29 At once a chronicler of the funeral and a critic of Zola’s work, Darío notes the diversity of those in attendance, from workers to professionals, and also praises Zola’s personality and art, particularly the dedication by which he achieved his aims. Thus Darío praises the committed writer and concludes: “Taking action is the duty of the true thinker of our time; taking action for healthy causes and following his faith and conviction at the risk of everything” (2001, 155).30 However, Vargas Llosa explains, we should not be misled: even if we can now observe in Darío a more receptive posture toward his immediate reality, in his commentary on Zola’s funeral, Darío cedes to emotion and sentiment; he pays homage to an author whose work was an important catalyst of his ultimately very different aesthetic (2001, 156). Written with clarity and precision, Mario Vargas Llosa’s undergraduate thesis offers a sharp and penetrating look at the early phase in which Rubén Darío’s aesthetic developed. It also allows us to discern Vargas Llosa’s tastes. These include the centrality of reading dissimilar authors and how the rejection or the incorporation of different authors helps the artist find his own creative path. However, Vargas Llosa argues, an authentic style is only achieved when the writer assimilates influences and can develop his own voice; if he does otherwise, posterity will judge him as a minor and mediocre writer. In his early phase of literary exploration, Darío seeks models from different literary traditions, particularly the Spanish and the French, as Vargas Llosa later does as well. A young Vargas Llosa comments on how the young Darío demonstrates various aesthetics through prose. Later, without discounting poetry, the author of La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001) would privilege darÍo through vargas llosa’s looking glass  197

narrative because of the scope of what it can represent. Even if today we might take issue with the Vargas Llosa’s somewhat simplistic contrast between Darío’s aesthetic vision and a committed posture, it is helpful to remember that in 1958, the year Vargas Llosa presented his thesis, several important studies of Modernismo had not yet been published—­for example, those by Manuel Pedro González and Ivan Schulman, published in 1960 and 1969 respectively—­which paid attention to the analysis of form and content, and to the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical. Nor did we have Enrique Anderson Imbert’s key contribution, La originalidad de Rubén Darío (1967; The originality of Rubén Darío). The young Vargas Llosa’s proposals about creative liberty and the author’s right to follow his taste and ignore fashion are noteworthy. The intensity with which Vargas Llosa comments on the development of Rubén Darío’s style undoubtedly promoted the Nicaraguan poet’s writing at that time, and today that intensity nourishes the essays and novels of the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner. The complexity of Darío’s relationship with Zola does not escape Vargas Llosa, especially because it developed at a time when writing was beginning to be professionalized and literature to be remunerated. At this historical moment, the voice of the artist was heard as much from journalistic platforms as from the pages of a book or literary magazine, thus laying the foundations for the work of the public intellectual, as demonstrated by the admired and vilified figure of Zola and later developed by Darío and Vargas Llosa. Thus, beyond its interest as an academic exercise, Vargas Llosa’s 1958 thesis continues to matter because it reveals precocious tendencies, common experiences, and preferences shared between two unparalleled figures of Hispanic and world literature, Rubén Darío and Mario Vargas Llosa. Notes

Translated from the Spanish by Janet Hendrickson. The essay appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 50, no. 1 (2017) at (https://​doi​ .org​/10​.1080​/08905762​.2017​.1341131). My thanks to its editor, Daniel E. 198  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

Shapiro, and publisher, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, for granting permission to reproduce it. 1. “[el Darío] esencial y desgarrado, el fundador de la poesía moderna” (1993, 402). 2. Special thanks to Professors Marco Martos and Américo Mudarra Montoya of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos for providing me with a copy of the book that contains Mario Vargas Llosa’s thesis. Spanish citations correspond to this edition; I indicate year and page number after each quote. 3. “el primer estilista.” 4. “Tiene poco perfume . . . se ve falta de color.” 5. “No superan aquella etapa de simple asimilación de influencias . . . son los que conocemos como poetas menores o mediocres. . . . Un autor nace cuando deja atrás aquel aprendizaje en el que, a través de su pluma, escriben otros autores, no él.” 6. “asuma una actitud, personal, intransferible, no calcada de ningún autor ni de ningún libro, frente a la realidad.” 7. “medio con la misma frialdad impasible con que el cirujano manipula el cadáver que autopsia . . . [Darío] ve en él sólo un pretexto para escribir.” 8. “como si se tratara de una sanguijuela sin vida, como un simple pretexto para escribir.” 9. “la historia del tío Lucas no llega a despertar indignación ni compasión: sólo recrea o entretiene. Y . . . el naturalismo, condenaba a aquella literatura que se proponía sólo recrear, divertir.” 10. “comenzará a ver a los demás y a verse a sí mismo de manera diferente. . . . vive una ficción.” 11. “espíritu sobresaltado y torturado.” 12. “la explicación del individualismo cerrado, intransigente . . . característica fundamental de Darío y de su obra.” 13. “niño prodigio.” 14. “La literatura, que lo salvó [a Darío] de la soledad, que consagró su diferencia, llevándolo a ocupar, en un tiempo brevísimo, una posición singular expectable, diferente, es para él un ejercicio, una preocupación formal.” 15. “la pasión de la forma.” 16. “‘El fardo’ fue reflejo inmediato de mi lectura de Zola, pero como el estilo no corresponde a mi temperamento ni a mi fantasía, no volví a incurrir en tales desvíos.” darÍo through vargas llosa’s looking glass  199

17. “aparece el Darío que conocemos, . . . un escritor, dueño de una convicción, que asume libremente el compromiso que ha adquirido consigo mismo, y que escribe de acuerdo a él, en un estilo admirable.” 18. “cargaría a cuestas . . . su drama de infancia.” 19. “unidad y grandeza a su obra.” 20. “el escritor está más a la vista.” 21. “poemas vividos,” “desahogos.” 22. “testimonio de desencanto.” 23. “Sí, yo he escrito estos Abrojos / tras hartas penas y agravios, / ya con la risa en los labios, / ya con el llanto en los ojos” (Prólogo, Abrojos). 24. “en poesía su experiencia.” 25. “de baile.” 26. “conjunto de reglas,” “armonía de caprichos.” 27. “nace a la literatura . . . insurgiendo contra Zola, tomando partido contra él, y alcanza su plenitud y su solidez, impugnando o desafiando insolentemente a aquel.” 28. “íntimamente, secretamente, se mantuvo ligado a él.” On this topic see Zanetti 2004 and Rogers 2010. 29. “el más grande elogio que escribiera nunca sobre otro escritor.” 30. “ir a la acción es el deber del verdadero pensador de nuestro tiempo; ir a la acción por las sanas causas y servir a su fe y a su convicción a riesgo de todo.” Selected Bibliography

Anderson Imbert, Enrique. La originalidad de Rubén Darío [Rubén Darío’s originality]. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967. Darío, Rubén. Abrojos. www​.elaleph​.com. Accessed August 16, 2019. https://​www​ .ellibrototal​.com​/ltotal​/ficha​.jsp​?idLibro​=​7005. —. Obras completas [Complete works]. Edited by M. Sanmiguel Raimúndez. 5 vols. Madrid: A. Aguado, S. A, 1950–­55. Franz, Carlos. “La emancipadora” [The Emancipated]. La Segunda, July 23, 2016. http://i​ mpresa​.lasegunda​.com​/2016​/07​/23​/A​/9T2VKQB5​/SE2VLDO7. Rogers, Geraldine. “Émile Zola en los textos porteños de Rubén Darío: una autoimagen de los escritores modernos en la Argentina finisecular” [Émile Zola in the Buenos Aires texts by Rubén Darío: A self-­image of modern writers in turn-­of-­the-­century Argentina]. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 39 (2010): 73–­189. 200  raquel chang-rodrÍguez

Schulman, Ivan A. Símbolo y color en la obra de José Martí [Symbol and color in the works by José Martí]. Madrid: Gredos, 1960. Schulman, Ivan A., and Manuel Pedro González. Martí, Darío y el modernismo [Martí, Darío, and Modernism]. Madrid: Gredos, 1969. Torres Espinosa, Edelberto. La dramática vida de Rubén Darío [Rubén Darío’s dramatic life]. Guatemala: Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1952. Vargas Llosa, Mario. Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío (Tesis universitaria 1958) [Basis for an interpretation of Rubén Darío (University thesis, 1958)]. Edited by Américo Mudarra Montoya. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2001. —. El pez en el agua: Memorias. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993. Translated by Helen Lane as A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). Zanetti, Susana, ed. Rubén Darío en “La Nación” de Buenos Aires 1892–­1916 [Rubén Darío at “La Nación” of Buenos Aires]. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2004.

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c h a p t e r 12

Mario Vargas Llosa at the New York Public Library Robert Dumont

Not that it happens very often, but, when asked who my favorite contemporary writer is, I always split it down the middle between Charles Portis and Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968)—­is one of my all-­time favorite novels along with La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984); Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975); La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982)—­ the list goes on. I only wish my Spanish were good enough to appreciate them better in the original, but fortunately all of his books have been well translated. Back in the mid-­1980s Mario Vargas Llosa visited the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library, where I worked, to do research for one of his novels and was there several days in a row. Each time he came, he would pick up his books at the busy South Hall delivery window then sit down at a nearby table and read. I had never seen anybody who was able to read for such long periods of time without fidgeting or nodding off or being distracted by the activity around them or getting up every fifteen minutes to stretch their legs or go to the bathroom. It was the most remarkable feat of continuous silent reading I had ever witnessed. Some of my colleagues urged me to approach him since they knew I was an aficionado of his writings. But I did not do it. I was too much in awe and I did not want to disturb him. 203

Flash forward to May of 2008. In the intervening years the North and South Hall reading rooms along with the delivery enclosure had been renovated and updated and were rechristened as the Rose Main Reading Room, so named in honor of the family who had donated the funds for the project. But here was Mario Vargas Llosa again, looking quite distinctive in a dark blazer and his hair now completely silver, sitting at one of the same tables where he had sat so many years ago—­ reading! It was not so easy to do that with the introduction of internet and database computers and the presence of the laptop crowd, wired and wireless, working on their spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations while streaming YouTube music videos or last week’s episode of American Idol; not to mention the hordes of tourists chattering and milling about and snapping pictures with their cameras and cell phones. Mere readers of books were something of a throwback. It was getting harder to imagine someone going to a large public library simply to “use the collection.” Anyway, this time, I figured what the hell. I approached him—­“Señor Vargas Llosa?” “Yes?” he answered looking up from his book—­and introduced myself and told him how much I admired his writing. I informed him I was on the staff of the library and should he require any reference help to let me know. He was very gracious and thanked me for my interest and offer of assistance. Afterward, I was at my private workspace in the catalog room looking at a shelf of my personal items and noticed how many books by Mario Vargas Llosa were there. I went back into the South Hall and approached him again with a copy of The War of the End of the World, which he kindly signed for me. I recalled his previous visit many years ago and he said he was doing research for his novel El hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989) at that particular time. Over the course of the next few weeks he continued to come regularly to the library. He was researching Roger Casement, the Irish patriot who was hanged by the British in 1916, about whom he was writing a novel. He said the library had a wealth of materials. His amazing capacity for sitting still and reading was not diminished in the least. 204  robert dumont

He always did his work at the first few tables in the South Hall reading room near the delivery window, where the constant commotion can sometimes have more the air of a bus terminal than a library. On one occasion two readers got into a dispute by one of the internet work stations. There was an older fellow—­a regular we called “Pops”—­who was bent over a book, while the other person resembled a younger, slightly deranged version of Joe Girardi, the skipper of the New York Yankees. Somehow, they had managed to invade each other’s personal space and were going at it. Vargas Llosa, along with everyone else in that part of the room, stopped what they were doing and watched the scene unfold. I intervened and was trying to calm things down, to little avail. I told Pops that he could move to another table, but he refused to do so. I told Joe Girardi that if he didn’t cool it I’d have to call security. “I don’t care about security and I don’t care if he’s eighty years old—­I’ll punch him out!” was his response. Just then a woman arrived with a ticket showing she had a reservation for the computer where Girardi was sitting. With an operatic sigh he got up and stalked off to another table. For the moment the situation was defused. As I walked away I looked at Vargas Llosa and said sotto voce, “Welcome to the New York Public Library.” He laughed and resumed his reading. We talked on several more occasions although I tried not to distract him from his work. At one point, I presented Vargas Llosa with copies of my own books—­ Borough of Churches and NYC Transit[s], both fiction collections, and sog Medic, a personal narrative of the Vietnam War which I had coauthored with a former U.S. Army Green Beret. He readily accepted them. In an accompanying note I told him that he was now one of a few persons in possession of my modest obras completas. As he thumbed through the pages of sog Medic he asked me if I had gone to Vietnam. I said no, I just helped Joe Parnar write the book. He noticed that I was originally from Oklahoma and recalled delivering a lecture many years ago at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and knowing Ivar Ivask, the former vargas llosa at the new york public library  205

editor of World Literature Today, which is published there. He thanked me and said, “I will read your books.” I took this as a courtesy rather than a promise. I am sure he must have a closet somewhere where he stores all the stuff that people constantly bestow on him. We had lunch together on another day at O’Casey’s, a wood-­paneled Irish pub near the library—­an appropriate venue given his research topic, with its portraits of Joyce and prints of the Irish countryside hanging on the walls. He ordered a Guinness and I had a Black and Tan. He offered a toast “to literature” and we clinked glasses. While waiting for our food we were discussing the joys and pains of writing. He listened patiently as I talked about my own novel in progress. We both agreed that the initial draft of any piece of writing is the hardest. “After that, the pleasure begins,” he declared. I mentally pinched myself. Surely, this was not really happening—­that I was actually sitting here chatting with Mario Vargas Llosa about his use of vasos comunicantes and various other literary matters. Surely, I would wake up any moment with the realization that I was only having a vivid and protracted dream. I told him I was recently in Mexico City and attended a lucha libre match. We both laughed when recalling one of the chapters in La tía Julia y el escribidor that depicts a wrestling match that ends in hilarious and utter confusion, with a certain “triumphant disorder” such as Roland Barthes describes in “The World of Wrestling.” I was surprised when Vargas Llosa said he was not familiar with Barthes’s essay and wanted to know if it was included in Mythologies. I asked him about the week he spent lecturing at Bard College the previous fall. I told him I was interested because my daughter graduated from Bard in 2005. He said he had been very impressed with the campus and the students. He thought the Hudson Valley area was quite beautiful but “possibly very cold in the winter.” I began telling him about Charles Portis (b. 1933), who I said was my favorite American author. He was curious and wanted to hear more about him. I related that Portis had written five novels and never married; that he lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and had 206  robert dumont

traveled extensively in Mexico. Vargas Llosa was familiar with True Grit because of the John Wayne movie but had not read the novel. I assured him the book was much superior to the film. I also said that someone had once observed that the reason Portis took so long between books was because every sentence he wrote was “a perfect American sentence.” He asked if Little Rock was a “village.” I told him it was a small-­to-­medium-­sized city. As we passed by the bar on the way out of the restaurant, a soccer match between Manchester United and Chelsea was being shown on the large-­screen tv. We stopped for a moment to watch the action and check the score. I asked him if he followed fútbol and he nodded affirmatively. Shortly after that, I arranged for Vargas Llosa to meet with Isaac Gewirtz, the curator of the Berg Collection, which contains some of the most noteworthy items in the library’s archives. The three of us gathered in Isaac’s small office one afternoon, and he provided some background on the Berg brothers—­Henry and Albert—­and spoke about the history of the collection. He recounted that the Berg brothers were the children of Hungarian immigrants to New York City in the nineteenth century and became prominent physicians while practicing medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Both were unmarried and avid book collectors. They lived together in a townhouse on East 73rd Street, which they filled with their acquisitions, primarily of rare editions of English and American literature—­especially works by Dickens, Thackery, and Sir Walter Scott. Among the Americans whose works they collected were Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, and Washington Irving. In addition to printed books their collection of rare items included a limited number of manuscripts, drawings and prints, and letters. In 1940 Albert donated the Berg brothers’ entire collection to the New York Public Library “in memory” of his brother Henry, who had died in 1938, and arranged for its endowment. He also purchased two other important private collections—­from W. T. H. Howe, the president of the American Book Company (Cincinnati); and Owen D. Young, the founder and chairman of rca and chairman of General Electric, which he then vargas llosa at the new york public library  207

donated to the library. With the addition of these materials, the Berg Collection became an important repository of manuscripts in addition to rare volumes. Over the decades the Berg Collection has continued to add materials of all types reflecting various literary trends, the papers of Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, being but a few examples. After that bit of background, much of which I was previously unaware of, Isaac was off to the stacks to fetch some things while Vargas Llosa and I sat waiting in his office. The presentation began with copies of the first Spanish-­and English-­ language editions of Don Quixote. Vargas Llosa remarked that copies of the first edition were smuggled into Peru, despite a ban by the Spanish government, though it is not known what became of them, and that in Spain today copies are owned by the Real Academia de la Lengua, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Duchess of Alba. Isaac next showed us some examples of the extraordinary illuminated books executed by William Blake, containing his most famous poems and etchings. Next was Charles Dickens’s own copy of A Christmas Carol, with his handwritten notes and directions to himself indicating which passages to emphasize when reading aloud before an audience. He opened a small box and handed Vargas Llosa a writing pen that had belonged to Dickens. “A great writer holds the pen of another great writer,” Isaac observed. He brought out a portable writing desk that had been used by one of the Brontë sisters, along with some pencils and a paper weight. Then it was a typescript of The Heart of Darkness. Vargas Llosa had not known that Conrad typed. He wondered if there was an earlier, handwritten version and disclosed that he still prefers to first do a handwritten draft before turning to the typewriter or computer. He described himself as a “great admirer of Conrad,” and said that Lord Jim was one of the first works of serious literature he had read when he was young. He noted that Conrad had known Roger Casement in Africa, and that it was while reading a biography of Conrad he had first learned about Casement. Now came Mark Twain’s first draft, with corrections, of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, followed by some of Virginia Woolf ’s original 208  robert dumont

diaries as well as a handwritten first draft of The Waves. Isaac said that the whereabouts of the later typescript drafts of the novel were unknown, as they had not been among Woolf ’s papers when they were acquired by the Bergs. He passed around her cane, which was found on the riverbank near where she drowned herself. Next was a typescript of a screenplay of Lolita that Vladimir Nabokov had sent to Stanley Kubrick. According to Isaac, Nabokov burned an earlier manuscript of Lolita because he feared being deported for creating an obscene work. Isaac asked Vargas Llosa if he had read Ada. “Yes, but I enjoyed Lolita much more and I believe Pale Fire is a masterpiece!” One of the most famous items in the Berg Collection is the typescript copy of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with Ezra Pound’s handwritten annotations. Only a few leaves of it have been displayed publicly, but a facsimile copy was published in 1971. I have always been intrigued by Eliot’s original idea for a title of the poem—­“He Do the Police in Different Voices”—­and there were those very words typed in all caps at the top of the first page. We were looking at some Carl Van Vechten photos of Gertrude Stein when the name of Borges came up. Isaac hustled off to the vaults to retrieve a photo of him taken two years before he died. Vargas Llosa told a story about when he was working as a journalist and had the opportunity to interview the Argentine master in France. “But when I sat down in his presence, I found myself unable to speak.” It was left to Borges to begin things by remarking that he considered “politics to be a form of tedium.” Eventually, Vargas Llosa recovered himself and the interview proceeded. He also recalled how reading Borges had been a secret passion for himself and for all the young Sartre-­influenced engagé writers he was involved with at one time. I inquired if it wasn’t a secret they perhaps were all keeping from one another. The Borges photo and his anecdote were a fitting end to an extraordinary presentation. That day was easily my most memorable day of working at the library over the course of thirty-­two years. As we were leaving the Berg Collection reading room, Isaac pointed out Dickens’s desk in the corner, vargas llosa at the new york public library  209

and next to it in a bookcase a copy of Vanity Fair, inscribed to Dickens by Thackeray. Vargas Llosa pulled the book off the shelf and turned to the last page and read aloud the novel’s final line: “let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” The next day Isaac told me he had given Vargas Llosa a copy of his own book, Beatific Soul—­Jack Kerouac on the Road, which he wrote to accompany the exhibition and celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, along with a facsimile copy of The Waste Land. I added one more item to the pile with a copy of True Grit. So many books Vargas Llosa was accumulating while staying in a sublet apartment near Union Square. What would he do with them all? But his time in New York was coming to an end. His research was nearly complete. He was preparing to return to Spain. On his last day at the library he presented me with a signed copy of his latest book to be translated into English, Travesuras de la niña mala (2006; The Bad Girl, 2007). His inscription read, “To Bob Dumont, my only American reader.” I could only laugh at the absurdity of that. But I knew from reading his books he had a finely-­honed sense of humor. We shook hands and said goodbye. He had provided me his mailing address in Madrid as well as two different email addresses. Over the next two years I wrote and emailed a few times but did not hear back from him directly. “Mario has gone to Paris for a literary conference,” I was advised by his secretary on one occasion; another time she said that he was traveling in the Congo and on a “tight schedule.” In September of 2010, I saw that the Roger Casement book was about to be published. The title in Spanish was El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012). I emailed again to congratulate him and said I looked forward to reading it. I also wanted to let him know I had recently retired from service with the library. I figured nothing would come of it but shortly afterward I received an email from his secretary asking me for my home address so she could send me a copy of the book. She further informed me that Vargas Llosa was to be a visiting professor at Princeton for the fall 2010 semester and would most likely be stopping by the library 210  robert dumont

at some point. I forwarded the email to Elizabeth (Estrada) Rutigliano, a former colleague, so she would have a heads-­up. And then a couple of weeks later he was indeed in the library. It happened to be a day when there was some sort of system-­wide glitch with the computer catalog and he was having a problem dealing with it. Fortunately, Elizabeth was on hand and able to resolve things. She offered to let him sit in a separate, enclosed area in the reading room where he wouldn’t be disturbed but he indicated he was fine at his regular table amid the usual hubbub. And just a few days after that came the splendid news that Mario Vargas Llosa had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Most well-­deserved in my opinion. But I was surprised actually. I had told Elizabeth previously that he probably would never get it because of his outspoken, anti-­left-­ wing political views. The Swedish Academy cited “his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Whatever their reasons, this time they got it right. The sheer excellence of his work won out. I read with great interest all the stories in the press and watched a video on the internet of his press conference at the Cervantes Institute before a “rowdy” group of 150 international journalists. His initial reaction had been that it was a hoax! I sent an email offering mil felicitaciones. Only one of diez mil no doubt. A follow-­up piece in the New York Times described his teaching duties at Princeton and the reaction of his students to the news of the award. The article stated that he “adored” spending his free afternoons in the New York Public Library because of its “ample space and generous natural light.” One unfortunate result of his winning the Nobel Prize, I felt, was that most likely, at least for now, Vargas Llosa’s days of simply walking into the library, calling for a book, and sitting down and reading it undisturbed were over. But eventually, after the excitement died down, and the allure of another project beckoned, I expected he would be back working at one of his usual tables. And indeed, that was the case. In the fall of 2013 he was again at Princeton—­co-­teaching a course on his own writings called “The Literary Works of Mario Vargas Llosa in vargas llosa at the new york public library  211

Their Artistic, Intellectual, and Political Contexts.” In an article posted on the Princeton University website he described his daily writing routine: “My schedule is very strict. I work in the morning at home; these are the most creative hours of the day. In New York, I walk in Central Park every morning. I love Central Park, particularly in autumn—­the colors, the trees, it’s beautiful. In the afternoons I like to work in the New York Public Library. I do writing, reading and re-­reading, and corrections.” And that was where I encountered him once again when I had stopped by the library to do my own research and visit with former colleagues. Elizabeth informed me that Vargas Llosa was there and pointed to where he was sitting. This time he had relocated to the North Hall reading room as that is where the books were now being delivered. Apparently, he did not like to wander too far from the delivery window while working. Once again, I approached him as I had in 2008 while he was engrossed in a book. This time he stood up and shook my hand and asked how I was enjoying retirement. We chatted at some length and I was almost afraid we were disturbing the other readers nearby, but no one complained. He said he was researching the topic of the Great Plague of the fourteenth century and reading firsthand accounts. I asked him if it was for a new book, but he said it was too soon to tell. No doubt Vargas Llosa subscribes to the superstition, as most writers do, that to talk too much about a work in progress in its early stages usually results in it never reaching completion. He insisted we must once again have lunch at the Irish pub and we quickly settled on a day during the following week that was mutually convenient. The lunch was much more relaxed this time, at least for me, and without the air of unreality it had held in 2008. He informed me that since winning the Nobel Prize he had purchased an apartment in Manhattan and was commuting to Princeton on the days he was to be in class. On days when he was not teaching, he was back at the library doing research on his latest projects. I thanked him once again for sending me a copy of El sueño del celta and for including me in the acknowledgments as being among the “conscious or unconscious” collaborators who had helped him write the book. It was certainly the latter in my case! 212  robert dumont

He was very taken aback when I mentioned the name Dick Meadows during our conversation. He asked me how I knew about Dick Meadows, who had for a time headed up his security detail during his unsuccessful run for president of Peru against Alberto Fujimori in 1990. I explained that Meadows was something of a legendary figure among the U.S. Army Special Operations personnel I had become associated with as a result of coauthoring the book sog Medic, which I had given him in 2008. I told him there was a statue of Dick Meadows at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and that a biography of him had been published after his death, which was in the library’s collection. He was aware of Meadows’s role in the unsuccessful attempt to rescue the American hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran in April of 1980. While posing as an Irish businessman Meadows acted as a covert operative and was involved in the advanced reconnaissance and tactical coordination on the ground as the mission was being planned. His job was to link up with the arriving rescue force and lead them to the Americans being held at the embassy then accompany the rescuers and the freed hostages to a staging area just outside of Tehran. The mission became a bust after three of the eight helicopters involved encountered mechanical problems while en route to the Iranian capital. A fourth helicopter collided with a transport plane while refueling in the desert, which resulted in a fire that destroyed both aircraft and caused the death of eight U.S. servicemen. Meadows had to flee the country immediately on a commercial flight before his cover was blown. I informed Vargas Llosa that during the Vietnam War, Meadows had headed up the first Bright Light operation of the Vietnam War in 1966, during which he and his team of commandos conducted a search-­and-­rescue mission for the pilot of a downed American aircraft inside the boundaries of North Vietnam. The action had to be personally approved by General Westmoreland and was launched from the deck of the aircraft carrier uss Intrepid operating in the South China Sea. It was unsuccessful, as was the attempted rescue of the hostages in Tehran, but nevertheless audacious. I pointed out that the Intrepid was now permanently berthed in Manhattan at a pier near vargas llosa at the new york public library  213

West Forty-­Fourth Street, a little over a mile from where we were sitting. He said he found this to be of great interest and when he returned to the reading room would consult the catalog so he could call the Meadows biography up from the stacks. We also discussed the plans by the library to reconfigure the Forty-­ Second Street building with a design by the British architect Norman Foster that was sparking controversy among the staff as well as readers and members of the public. As a long-­time user of the library he was especially dismayed by the plans to close the book stacks and ship nearly four million titles to the New Jersey off-­site facility that the library shares with Princeton and Columbia Universities. The resulting empty space was to be used to house the Mid-­Manhattan Circulating Library. He eventually signed a petition along with several other writers, including Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, and Jonathan Lethem, that urged the library trustees to reconsider the plan lest the building “become a busy social center where focused research is no longer the primary goal.” The protest by Vargas Llosa and others had the desired effect. Soon after the petition’s publication, a grant by one of the its principal donors enabled the library to utilize another level of the underground stacks beneath Bryant Park, which resulted in half as many books being sent to New Jersey. (In 2014 the library decided to abandon the Foster plan altogether.) In November, after Vargas Llosa’s teaching duties at Princeton had ended, we got together one more time for dinner at Hill Country Barbecue on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I informed him ahead of time it was a Texas-­style restaurant and somewhat raucous with two levels of dining, and live music on the lower one, but he indicated that was perfectly fine. We met on the sidewalk on a colder-­than-­normal evening and greeted each other. As we opened the door to the restaurant a wave of noise from the busy Saturday-­night scene washed over us. The clamor of the restaurant seemed only to entice him further and he appeared eager to be immersed in it. After we were seated and conversing, a bluegrass band was playing, and I explained that this was a type of music more indigenous to the 214  robert dumont

southeastern parts of the U.S. than Texas. But no matter, the music was secondary to the main matter at hand. Somehow, we managed to order too much and ended up with so many plates of food sitting on the table in front of us that he eyed them warily and declared, “Tonight we are going to die.” During dinner a young woman from Peru approached our table and asked if he was indeed Mario Vargas Llosa. When he affirmed that he was, she was quite delighted and told him that she was a long-­time admirer of his writing. During the meal he recalled a recent banquet he had attended where everyone around him was being served prime rib while he was given a plate of what he described as “unappetizing” vegetables. He said he stared at his plate in dismay and observed everyone else enjoying their prime rib. When he asked one of his hosts why he had been given a vegetable platter and no prime rib, he was told, “Oh, we heard you’d become a vegetarian.” Perhaps he has since become a vegetarian, but as of November 2013 this was definitely not the case. After ordering another round of drinks and then having eaten our fill of ribs and brisket and sausage while sampling side dishes of collard greens, sweet potatoes, and black-­eyed peas, it was time to call it a night. The Texas barbecue feast was ended. Since he would be leaving for Madrid in another day or two he had no use for any leftovers, so I took them all home with me. A subsequent contact with Vargas Llosa occurred in the summer of 2016 when the library was reopening the Rose Main Reading Room to the public following a two-­year renovation that was not part of any architectural grand plan. Instead, the project had resulted when a chunk of ceiling in the South Hall had fallen during the night, which led to the room’s immediate closure and funds being raised for a makeover of both the North and South Hall reading rooms. A former colleague at the library contacted me and asked me to ask Vargas Llosa if he would be able to participate in an event to celebrate the reading rooms’ reopening in October. He replied, and I relayed his message, that he regretted he would not be in New York on the scheduled date of the event. I was not really expecting to meet with him further and was unsure if he would resume working in the reading rooms while in New York, given vargas llosa at the new york public library  215

his busy schedule. However, on a visit to the library in March of 2018, I noticed information for an event that was part of the Live from the nypl discussion series that had been posted in the elevator—­“Mario Vargas Llosa . . . A Life in Letters . . . Monday, May 14.” The full announcement posted on the library’s website stated: “Legend has it that Mario Vargas Llosa was notified of winning the Nobel Prize while working in the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Vargas Llosa has worked on at least two of his novels here—­The Storyteller and The Dream of the Celt—­and while teaching at Princeton he spent afternoons off here reading. This year, in celebration of his new novel, The Neighborhood (Cinco esquinas, 2016), the titan of contemporary Western literature travels from the stacks to the stage to discuss his life in letters.” Much to celebrate indeed! And perhaps the perfect occasion for his reappearance in the New York Public Library reading rooms. On the night of the event in the Bartos Forum, where the Live from the nypl series takes place, it was standing room only. It was to be an interview/ conversation between Vargas Llosa and Paul Holdengräber from the library’s staff. Holdengräber had conducted hundreds of these interviews over the years with various authors, filmmakers, artists, and public personalities. A low stage with two chairs and two microphones was at the front of the auditorium while a table had been set up in the rear where the author would later sign copies of his books that were available in English and in Spanish. The discussion between the two lasted well over an hour and Vargas Llosa repeated some of the same stories he’d told me years ago, including his account of his first meeting with Borges. When things ended and he stepped off the stage, a security line of special events and programming staff, with arms outspread, immediately formed to prevent anyone in the audience from approaching him. “You need to go to the back of the room to get a book signed,” they insisted. I said I just wanted to say hello as I was an “acquaintance” and attempted to plead my case, but the security folks were having none of it. They kept ordering everyone to the back of the room. 216  robert dumont

Fortunately, in the confusion of the moment I saw an opening and was able to penetrate their ranks. Vargas Llosa then spotted me and was effusively greeting me, which kept security at bay. We chatted briefly and he said he’d made a return visit to the Berg Collection that afternoon and recalled the time when we were there. Paul Holdengräber now joined us and introduced himself as we’d not previously met when I was still on the library’s staff. I told Vargas Llosa that judging from the crowd forming in the back of the room, “You are going to have a long night of it signing books.” I indicated I didn’t wish to detain him further and would be on my way and he responded by saying, “Next time I’m in New York we will have lunch.” I informed him that the Irish pub where we’d gone before was no longer in business, so we’d have to find some place new. Again, I took what he said more as a courtesy and not as a promise but replied it would “certainly be my pleasure.” As certainly will be the reading and rereading of his many books.

vargas llosa at the new york public library  217

14. Mario Vargas Llosa at the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Photo by Morgana Vargas Llosa. Courtesy of Mario Vargas Llosa.

Contributors

J. J. Armas Marcelo is the General Director of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa,

in Madrid, Spain. A columnist, essayist, and novelist trained in classical philology at the Universidad Complutense, he is a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish American Academy of Cádiz and the Academia Peruana de la Lengua as well as the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua, both affiliates of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Translated into more than ten languages, Armas Marcelo’s novels have received numerous prizes, among them the Galdós for El camaleón sobre la alfombra (The chameleon on the carpet) in 1975, the International Plaza y Janés for Los dioses mismos (The gods themselves) in 1989, and the International Ciudad de Torrevieja for Casi todas las mujeres (Almost all women) in 2003. Armas Marcelo’s writings are marked by a Latin American bent evident in his many novels taking place there or treating the history of the region such as Así en La Habana como en el cielo (In Havana as well as in heaven) (2007), Las naves quemadas (Burnt ships) (1982) and La noche que Bolívar traicionó a Miranda (The night Bolívar betrayed Miranda) (2012). In 2014 Armas Marcelo was the first writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa at the City College of New York, cuny. Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez, PhD, New York University, is Distinguished Professor

of Spanish American Literature and Culture at the Graduate Center and the City College (cuny) where she codirects the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. Her most recent publication is the translation and edition of Luis Jerónimo de Oré’s Account of the Martyrs in the Provinces of La Florida (with N. Vogeley, 2017). Other titles by Chang-­Rodríguez include Literatura y cultura en el Virreinato del 219

Perú: apropiación y diferencia (2017, coedited), Cartografía garcilasista (2013), “Aquí, ninfas del sur, venid ligeras”: Voces poéticas virreinales (2008), Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and “La Florida del Inca” (2006), published simultaneously in English and Spanish. In 2013 she coedited Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 87 devoted to Mario Vargas Llosa’s legacy. Chang-­Rodríguez is the founding editor of the prize-­winning journal Colonial Latin American Review and the recipient of several grants including a National Endowment for the Humanities (neh) fellowship, and the Enrique Anderson Imbert Prize given by the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (anle). In 2011 the National Helenic and Kapodistrian University (Athens, Greece) awarded Chang-­Rodríguez a Doctor of Letters honoris causa; she is Profesora Honoraria of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru), Miembro Correspondiente of the Academia Peruana de la Lengua and the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua, affiliates of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. Alonso Cueto, PhD, University of Texas at Austin, is a Peruvian writer whose

work has been translated into sixteen languages. He is the author of novels, short stories, essays, and a children’s book. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for the period 2002–­3, and was awarded the Anna Seghers prize (Berlin, 2000). He won the Herralde Novel Prize (Barcelona, 2005), and the second prize in the Premio Iberoamericano Planeta–­Casa de América, 2007. His novel Grandes miradas (Great Glances) (2003) was made into a movie by Francisco Lombardi (under the title Mariposa Negra). The movie won several international awards and its female lead, Melania Urbina, won the first prize for her performance in the Biarritz film festival. The movie also won the Glauber Rocha Award for the best Latin American movie in the Montreal festival. Frank Wynne’s 2005 translation of his novel La hora azul (The Blue Hour), published by Random House, won the Valle Inclán Prize awarded by the British Society of Authors in February 2014. Two new movies (La Hora Azul and Magallanes) based on his novels have been completed. Among his recent novels is La segunda amante del rey (The king’s second lover) (2017). He is a member of the Academia Peruana de la Lengua, an affiliate of the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language, and currently teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Peru. In 2015, Alonso Cueto was writer-­in-­residence for the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa of the City College of New York, cuny. 220 contributors

Robert Dumont is a graduate of the University of Tulsa. After traveling extensively

in Europe, he settled in New York City where he worked for thirty-­two years in the General Research Division and in the Cooperative Services Division of the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. A fiction writer, he has published in Telephone, Innisfree, Caprice, and the online magazine Legible. Dumont has authored the following fiction collections: Borough of Churches (2003), a compilation of short stories, and the “collage novel” nyc Transit[s] (2003); he has coauthored sog Medic: Stories from Vietnam and Over the Fence (2007), and Bac Si: A Green Beret Medic’s War in Vietnam (2017). He is currently working on a new edition of sog Medic, as well as other Vietnam-­related writing projects. A comic novel on the history and settlement of the nation of Iceland, much of which takes place in the reading room of the New York Public Library, is a long-­term work in progress. Ángel L. Estévez, PhD, Graduate Center, cuny, is Associate Professor and

Director of the Master’s Program in Spanish at the City College of New York (cuny). His area of research centers on twentieth-­century Spanish American and Caribbean literatures, including magical realism, the fantastic, and translation. His most recent publications are La modalidad fantástica en el cuento dominicano del siglo XX (2nd ed., Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 2015); El español y su evolución, coauthored with Silvia Burunat (New York: Peter Lang, 2014); “The Construction of the Magic and the Role of Popular Religion in the Caribbean Context” (Critical Insights: Magical Realism, ed. Ignacio López-­Calvo, Hackensack: Salem Press, 2014); El español y su estructura, coauthored with Silvia Burunat and Aleksín Ortega (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); El español y su sintaxis, coauthored with Silvia Burunat and Aleksín Ortega (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Translation: Juan Rodríguez y los comienzos de la Ciudad de Nueva York (from English: Juan Rodríguez and the Beginnings of New York City); and Preparación para el Examen tasc: Examen de competencia para educación secundaria (from English: tasc: Test Assessing Secondary Completion) (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2016). Dr. Estévez has taught at Lehman College and Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus. Carlos Franz, a widely translated writer, has published five novels: Santiago

Cero (1989, cicla Prize for Latin American Novels in 1988); El lugar donde estuvo el Paraíso (The place where paradise once stood) (1996), first runner-­up contributors  221

in the Planeta Latin American Prize; El desierto (The desert) (2006), International Novel Prize La Nación of Buenos Aires in 2005; Almuerzo de vampiros (Luncheon of vampires) (2007), awarded best novel of the year by Consejo Nacional del Libro de Chile; and Si te vieras con mis ojos (If you could see yourself with my eyes) (2015), Círculo de Críticos de Arte de Chile Prize and Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa Prize for Best Spanish-­Language Novel published in the years 2014–­16 in Spanish America and Spain. Franz has authored a volume of short stories, La Prisionera (The prisoner) (2009), and the literary essay, La muralla enterrada (The buried wall) (2001), for which he was awarded the Premio Municipal de Ensayo, Santiago, Chile in 2002. He has also published a novella: Alejandra Magna (2011). Among other distinctions, Franz has been writer-­in-­residence in Berlin (with the daad–­Berliner Künstler Program, 2000), visiting fellow of the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge (2001), honorary visiting fellow at the Spanish and Spanish American Studies Department, King’s College, University of London (2002–­4), lecturer at the Cátedra Julio Cortázar, Universidad de Guadalajara (2010), and the Cátedra Alfonso Reyes, Universidad de Monterrey (2013), and resident fellow at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation (2012). In 2012 Franz was elected member of the Academia Chilena de la Lengua and correspondent of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language. In 2016 he was appointed writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa at the City College of New York, cuny. Efraín Kristal, PhD, Stanford University, is Professor of Spanish and Comparative

Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles (ucla). He is author of over one hundred articles, book chapters and prologues. He edited The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (2005). His work on Mario Vargas Llosa includes Temptation of the Word. The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (1998) and The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa (2012), coedited with John King. In 2013, Professor Kristal delivered the inaugural lecture of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa at The City College of New York, cuny. Mónica Lavín is the author of nine books of short stories, notably Ruby Tuesday

no ha muerto (Ruby Tuesday has not died), Gilberto Owen Literary National Prize, 1996; Uno no sabe (One doesn’t know) (2003), Antonin Artaud award finalist; La corredora de Cuemanco y el aficionado a Schubert (The Cuemanco 222 contributors

runner and the Schubert’s aficionado) (2008), Manual para enamorarse (Manual to learn how to fall in love) (2011), La casa chica (The small house) (2012). She has written ten novels, including Café cortado (White coffee) (2001), Book of the Year, Narrativa de Colima Prize; La más faulera (The most fault maker) (2007); Despertar los apetitos (Awakening the appetites) (2005); Yo, la peor (I, the worst) (2009), winner of Premio Iberoamericano de Novela Elena Poniatowska; Doble filo (Double edge) (2014); and Cuando te hablen de amor (When they talk to you about love) (2017). Her stories appear in anthologies both in Mexico and around the world, and she is a fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Yaddo Colony of the Arts, and the Hermitage. She writes for El Universal newspaper and interviews for Public Television in Mexico. She belongs to the Sistema Nacional de Creadores (fonca) and is a professor in the Creative Writing Department of the Universidad Autónoma in Mexico City. In 2017, she was appointed writer-­in-­residence at the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa of the City College of New York, cuny. Carlos Riobó, PhD, Yale University, is Professor of Latin American Literature

and Cultures in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures PhD program at the Graduate Center (cuny) and Professor of Spanish and Comparative literature at the City College of New York (cuny), where he also chairs the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures and codirects the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2017, he was invited to teach at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. He has been an Editorial Board member of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas since 2016. His publications include the books Caught between the Lines: Captives, Frontiers, and National Identity in Argentine Literature and Art (University of Nebraska Press, New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies series, 2019); Sub-­versions of the Archive: Manuel Puig’s and Severo Sarduy’s Alternative Identities (Bucknell University Press, 2011); Cuban Intersection of Literary and Urban Spaces (suny Press, 2011); Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization, coedited (Paradigm Press, 2013); and, among his many peer-­reviewed articles is, “Raiding the Anales of the Empire: Sarduy’s Subversions of the Latin American Boom,” Hispanic Review 2013 (2014 lasa’s Sylvia Molloy Award winner).

contributors  223

Index

Abbes, Johnny, 167n17 Aguiar e Silva, Vítor Manuel de, 150, 152 Alonso, Carlos J., 174 Al Qaeda, 22 Amazon region, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 17, 31, 62, 88, 117, 125, 126, 178, 179, 180 ambiguity in literature, 64–­65, 67, 152 Anderson Imbert, Enrique, 198 antisemitism, 21, 27, 28 Arendt, Hannah, 59 Arlt, Roberto: “The Failed Writer,” 77 Armas Marcelo, J. J., xvi, 72 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. See La tía Julia y el escribidor Azorín ( José Martínez Ruiz): La ruta de don Quijote, 37 The Bad Girl. See Travesuras de la niña mala Balcells, Carmen, 50–­51, 80 Balzac, Honoré de, 78, 81; The Human Comedy, 81 Barral, Carlos, 77, 79, 84 Barthes, Roland, 206

Bases para una interpretación de Rubén Darío (Vargas Llosa), 188 Benavides, Jorge Eduardo, 75 Berg Collection (New York Public Library), 207–­10, 217 Borges, Jorge Luis, 36, 42, 43, 46, 59, 60, 64–­65, 88, 209, 216 Breton, André, 54 Broch, Hermann, 59 Brother Francisco, 12, 14, 15 Los cachorros (Vargas Llosa), 19, 77 Camus, Albert, 79 Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. See Pantaleón y las visitadoras Carpentier, Alejo: El reino de este mundo, 159 Carta de batalla por “Tirant lo Blanc” (Vargas Llosa), xii Cartas a un joven novelista (Vargas Llosa), 77, 135 La Casa de Caoba, 137, 146, 156 Casanova, Julián, 162

225

La casa verde (Vargas Llosa), xvi, 5, 68, 79–­80, 85, 112, 115, 117, 120, 175, 203; Anselmo, 104, 117, 118; Aquilino, 117; La Chunga, 117, 118; Fushía, 104, 117; García, the priest, 118; Lalita, 117; Lituma, 104, 117; La Selvática, 117; Toñita, 118; Zevallos, as the doctor, 118 Casement, Roger, 87–­88, 204, 208, 210; Black Diaries, 87. See also El sueño del celta Castro, Fidel, 80 Cateriano, Pedro, 84 Cayuela, Ricardo, 122 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, xvi, 35–­36, 37, 38, 39, 93, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103, 104. See also Don Quixote de la Mancha Chang-­Rodríguez, Raquel, xvii, xviii, 36, 188 Chekhov, Anton, 42 chivalric novel, xii, 38, 39, 43, 99 Cinco esquinas (Vargas Llosa), 216 La ciudad y los perros (Vargas Llosa), xvi, 15, 42, 52, 58, 76, 79, 80, 85, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 111, 116, 118, 120, 132, 194; Alberto “the Poet” Fernández, 80, 95, 98, 99–­100, 101, 102, 112, 116, 118, 122; Boas, 97; Cava, 97; “the Circle,” 94, 95, 97, 100, 101–­ 2; Jaguar, 58, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 112, 116, 133n6; Paulino, 103; Ricardo “the Slave” Arana, 99, 101, 112, 116, 133n6; Rulos, 97; and Slim Higueras, 116; Teniente Gamboa, 99; Teresa, 99, 100, 101 “The Civilization of the Spectacle,” 91 Claudel, Paul, 54 Columbus, Christopher, 159, 175 226 index

Communism, 21, 22, 119, 120 Conde Sturla, Pedro, 154, 165n6 Congo, Africa, 87, 88, 103, 210 Conrad, Joseph, 72, 81, 208; Heart of Darkness, 87, 208; Lord Jim, 208 Conversación en La Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral) (Vargas Llosa), xiv, xvi, 9, 42, 57, 58, 79, 85, 94, 100, 101, 104, 112, 118, 119, 120, 132, 203; Aída, 101; Ambrosio, 118, 119; Cayo Bermúdez, 101; General Manuel A. Odría in, 94, 119; Jacobo in, 101; Santiago “Zavalita” Zavala, xiv, 42, 57, 58, 79, 94, 95, 100, 101, 118–­20, 122 Cortázar, Julio, 66 Coyné, André, 53 Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (Vargas Llosa), 64, 74; Fonchito, 64; Lucrecia, 64; Rigoberto, 64 Cuban Revolution, 80–­81, 113 The Cubs. See Los cachorros Cueto, Alonso, xv–­xvi, 34, 53, 90 Dante, 176, 177, 178, 183; Divina Commedia, 176, 177 Darío, Rubén, xii, xvii, xviii, 187–­98; Abrojos, 195; “Las albóndigas del coronel,” 190, 191; Azul, 189, 194, 195–­96; “El fardo,” 191–­92, 194; “Historia de un picaflor,” 190; “Mis primeros versos,” 190; “La muerte de la emperatriz de China,” 194; Opiniones, 187, 197; “El pájaro azul,” 190; “El rey burgués,” 194; “El rubí,” 194; “El sátiro sordo,” 194; “El velo de la reina Mab,” 194; El viaje a Nicaragua e Historia de mis libros, 194 Death in the Andes. See Lituma en los Andes

A Defense of Tirant lo Blanc. See Carta de batalla por “Tirant lo Blanc” Defort, Magdalena, 142 Dickens, Charles, 41, 207, 208, 210 The Discreet Hero. See El héroe discreto Dominican Republic, 48, 85, 86, 136, 149, 153, 154, 156, 158 Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes Saavedra), xvi, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 93, 94, 95, 102–­3, 208; Don Quixote, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 93, 95, 96, 97–­98, 99–­101, 102, 103, 104, 105; Dulcinea, 101; Rocinante, 98; Sancho Panza, 36, 38, 39, 93, 96, 100, 102; Sansón Carrasco, 95 Don Quixote’s Route. See Azorín Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 41 The Dream of the Celt. See El sueño del celta Dumas, Alexandre, 76, 102; The Three Musketeers, 102 Dumont, Robert, xviii Eagleton, Terry, 155 Elogio de la madrastra (Vargas Llosa), 63, 66, 74, 76, 101; Fonchito, 63; Lucrecia, 63; Rigoberto, 63–­64, 104 Estévez, Ángel L., xvii, 150 Evans, Richard J., 162, 167nn19–­20 Fascism, 21, 22 Faulkner, William, xvi, 41, 45, 46, 60, 62, 78, 138, 190; Light in August, 45; Sanctuary, 45; The Sound and the Fury, 45; The Wild Palms, 46, 60 The Feast of the Goat. See La fiesta del Chivo La fiesta del Chivo (Vargas Llosa), xvii, 46, 47, 48, 58–­59, 84, 85, 86, 87, 94,

136, 138, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153–­57, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165n6, 166n10, 198; Agustín “Cerebrito” Cabral, 141, 156, 157, 158; Amado García Guerrero, 158; Antonio de la Maza, 151–­52; General Pupo Román, 145, 156; Joaquín Balaguer, 147, 154, 156; Manuel Alfonso in, 157; Pedro Livio in, 145; Rafael “The Goat” Leónidas Trujillo, 47, 85, 94, 95, 136–­37, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144–­46, 151–­52, 156, 157, 158; Ramfis Trujillo, 146; Urania Cabral in, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146–­47, 156–­57 film adaptations, 51–­53 A Fish in the Water. See El pez en el agua Flaubert, Gustave, xvii, 43, 44, 45, 76, 78, 81, 116, 130, 137–­40, 143, 144, 147; Madame Bovary, xvii, 42, 43, 44, 45, 137–­38, 141, 143 El Foro Público (newspaper column), 157, 166n12 Franz, Carlos, xvi, 72, 110 Fujimori, Alberto, 75, 160, 213 Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, 22 Gabriel García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, 78 Gallagher, David, 90 García, Alan, 90 García Hortelano, Juan, 84 García Márquez, Gabriel, 71 Gauguin, Paul, 66; Vision after the Sermon, 66. See also El paraíso en la otra esquina Góngora, Luis de, 83, 195 González, Felipe, 154 index  227

González Echevarría, Roberto, 174–­75 Green, Anna, 160–­61 The Green House. See La casa verde Grossman, Edith, 164 La guerra del fin del mundo (Vargas Llosa), 58, 68, 81, 94, 97, 203, 204; Antonio “the Counselor” Conselheiro, 58, 94, 95, 97, 98; João Abade, 97; João Grande, 97; León de Natuba, 97; María Quadrado, 97; Moreira César, 58; Pajeú, 97 El hablador (Vargas Llosa), xvii, 66, 123, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 204, 216; Gabriele Malfatti, 177, 178, 181, 182; Machiguenga Indians portrayed in, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183; Saúl “Mascarita” Zuratas, 178, 179, 181, 182; Schneils (linguists), 179 Hemingway, Ernest, 71, 72; “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” 71, 73 El héroe discreto (Vargas Llosa), xv, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67–­68, 91, 95, 98; Edilberto Torres, 64, 65, 95; Felícito Yanaqué, xiv, 60–­61, 62, 63, 64; Fonchito, 62, 64–­65, 68, 95; Ismael Carrero, 61; Lituma, 62, 63; Lucrecia, 62, 64–­65; Rigoberto, 62, 64, 65, 68; Silva, 62, 63 Historia de Mayta (Vargas Llosa), 48, 81; and Alejandro Mayta, 48–­49 historical novel, 46–­47, 52, 86, 141, 142, 145, 149–­64, 167n18 Hitler, Adolf, 21, 27 Holocaust, 27, 28 Hugo, Victor, 41, 78, 189 228 index

Iquitos (city), 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16 Islamic fundamentalism, 22, 24, 25 Joyce, James, 41, 59, 138, 143, 190, 206 “June 14th youth,” 137 jungle. See Amazon region jungle novel (novela de la selva), xvii, 173–­74, 175 Kafka, Franz, 183; Metamorphosis, 181 “Karl Popper, al día,” (“Karl Popper, updated”), 114, 123, 124 Kristal, Efraín, xiv, xv, xvi, 56, 73, 81, 90, 102, 172 Lavín, Mónica, xvi–­xvii, 136, 150 Lefere, Robin, 166n10 Leoncio Prado Military Academy, 7, 8, 53, 74, 76, 80, 111, 118 Letters to a Young Novelist. See Cartas a un joven novelista Lituma (character), 101, 122 Lituma en los Andes (Vargas Llosa), xiv, 57, 63; Lituma, xiv, 63, 67; Silva, 63 El loco de los balcones (Vargas Llosa), 95 Lombardi, Francisco, 51–­52 London, Jack, 61; “The Minions of Midas,” 61 Lunkvist, Artur, 88 Machiguenga Indians. See El hablador The Madman of the Balconies. See El loco de los balcones Malraux, André, 41 Mann, Thomas: Doktor Faustus, 65 Marrero Aristy, Ramón, 146 Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 155 Martorell, Joanot, xii

martyrs of 30 May, 154 Marxism, 21, 114, 128 Meadows, Dick, 213–­14 Menton, Seymour, 159, 167n18 Mirabal sisters, 137, 145 Mita, goddess, 12–­14 Modernismo, xviii, 187, 194, 198 Moro, César (Alfredo Quispez Asín), xvi, 53–­54; Los anteojos de azufre, 54 narrative reality, 115, 117, 131 National University of San Marcos (Lima), xviii, 98, 178–­79, 187–­88 The Neighborhood. See Cinco esquinas New York Public Library, xviii, 203–­17 Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy, 124 Nobel Prize, xii, 76, 80, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 187, 211, 212, 216 The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. See Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto “Una novela para el siglo XXI” (“A novel for the twenty-­first century”), 36, 94, 95, 96 Novick, Peter, 162, 167n21 Odría, Manuel A., 98. See also Conversación en La Catedral La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y “Madame Bovary” (Vargas Llosa), 42, 78, 137, 144 Ossio, Juan, 90 Oviedo, José Miguel, 130 Owen (the hippopotamus), 30–­31, 32 Palma, Ricardo, 189, 190, 191 Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Vargas Llosa), xii, xvi, 3, 6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 52, 68, 97, 101, 113, 125, 127, 130, 131,

132, 175; la Brasileira, 17, 125; General “Tiger” Collazos, 126; Maclovia, 125–­26; Pantaleón Pantoja, 3, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 94, 97, 101, 125–­26, 127, 128; “Pantyland,” 94, 97, 104; “Special Service,” 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 20, 127 El paraíso en la otra esquina (Vargas Llosa), xiv, 10, 57, 66, 87; Flora Tristán, xiv, 57; Paul Gauguin, 87, 103 Paz, Octavio, 75 Perkowska, Magdalena, 163 The Perpetual Orgy. See La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y “Madame Bovary” El pez en el agua (Vargas Llosa), 36, 75, 76, 82, 90, 93, 187 Popper, Karl, 113–­14, 121, 123, 131; The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 114; The Open Society and Its Enemies, 113; The Poverty of Historicism, 114, 121 Porras Barrenechea, Raúl, 36, 78, 93 Portis, Charles, 203, 206–­7; True Grit, 203, 207, 210 Portocarrero, Gonzalo, 140 In Praise of the Stepmother. See Elogio de la madrastra Proust, Marcel, 135 ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? (Vargas Llosa), 63, 81; Lituma, 63 racism, 21, 26, 27, 29 Ranke, Leopold von, 160 The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. See Historia de Mayta religious sects, 12, 13–­15 Revel, Jean-­François: How Democracies Perish, 30 index  229

Riobó, Carlos, xvii, 172 romanticism, 38 Rulfo, Juan, 36, 43 Rushdie, Salman, 25, 214; The Satanic Verses, 25 Salazar Bondy, Sebastián, 78 Sánchez, Luis Alberto, 187 Sánchez, Norwin, 36, 93 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 79, 130 Silva (character), 101 Stalin, Joseph, 21, 48 The Storyteller. See El hablador El sueño del celta (Vargas Llosa), xiv, 57, 59, 68, 90, 103, 175, 210–­11, 213, 216; Roger Casement, xiv, 57, 103 surrealists, 54 terrorism, 22, 25, 32; in Peru, 48; and suicide terrorists, 22–­24, 27 La tía Julia y el escribidor (Vargas Llosa), xvi, 65–­66, 69, 76, 99, 100–­ 101, 104, 113, 125, 128, 129, 130, 132, 203, 206; Aunt Julia, 128, 129; Mario, 129; Pedro Camacho, 99, 100, 128–­ 30; Dr. Quinteros, 128 The Time of the Hero. See La ciudad y los perros Tirant lo Blanch, 99 Tolstoy, Leo, 41; War and Peace, 82 Torres, Edelberto, 189 totalitarianism, 21, 22 “total novel,” 121–­22 Travesuras de la niña mala (Vargas Llosa), 66, 67, 87, 100, 101, 210; and the “bad girl,” 101, 102, 104–­5; Ricardo Somocurcio, 66, 67, 100, 101, 102 230 index

Tristán, Flora, 87. See also El paraíso en la otra esquina Troup, Kathleen, 160–­61 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas, xvii, 48, 85, 86, 136–­37, 149, 153, 154, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164 “The truth about lies.” See La verdad de las mentiras Turia (literary journal), 89–­90 Twain, Mark, xii, 76, 208–­9 Última hora (newspaper), 36, 93 Updike, John, 77 Vallejo, César, 54, 68 Vargas Llosa, Mario: in Barcelona, 79, 80; childhood and early years, 36–­37, 73–­76, 79, 80, 93, 192–­93, 208; and Communism, 132n2; in Europe, 6, 29; family relationships, 31, 73–­74, 76, 84, 128; in Florence, 175; in high school, 36; honors and awards, xii, xiii, 84, 87, 90–­91, 189; liberalism, xvi, 111, 113, 115, 121, 124, 130, 131, 132, 132n1; in Lima, 36, 78, 129; literary vocation of, 44, 73, 75, 76–­79, 84, 86, 91, 111, 129, 189, 212; in London 79, 80; in Madrid, 79, 80, 84; and Marxism, 111, 115, 120,125, 132; in military school, 7, 8, 15, 53, 74; in Paris, 78–­79, 80; in Peru, 4–­5, 6, 8, 11–­12, 31; during presidential election, 75, 82–­83, 90, 187, 213; in Princeton, 211–­14, 216; in Puerto Rico, 12–­13; Sartreanism, 111, 115, 119, 120, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132, 193, 209; socialism, 57; at university, 37, 45, 53, 78, 98, 187–­89. See also Nobel Prize

La verdad de las mentiras (Vargas Llosa), 135, 164 Verne, Jules, 76 “El visitante” (“The visitor”) (Vargas Llosa), 63; Lituma, 63; Silva, 63 The War at the End of the World. See La guerra del fin del mundo Warren, Austin, 152, 153 The Way to Paradise. See El paraíso en la otra esquina

Weldt-­Basson, Helen C., 159, 167n18 Wellek, Rene, 152, 153 Who Killed Palomino Molero?. See ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 139 Woolf, Virginia, 138, 209; and Mrs. Dalloway, 138, 143, 144; The Waves, 209 World War II, 21, 23, 32 Zola, Émile, 187, 191–­92, 194, 196–­97, 198

index  231

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