I had marked April 13 on my calendar because it was the birthday of Thomas Jefferson—the author of a phrase that adorns more than one library: “I cannot live without books”—and three Nobel Prize winners in Literature (Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and J.M.G. Le Clézio) and the death of one (Günter Grass), and also the birthday of a chess genius, Garry Kasparov. That day I was celebrating mine at home (it’s not just celebrities who have birthdays, of course) with family and friends when I got the call with the news: Mario Vargas Llosa had died.
The last Vargas Llosa book that entered my library a few weeks ago was El fuego de la imaginación (The Fire of Imagination), his collection of newspaper columns and essays published a couple of years ago by Alfaguara. I spent some time leafing through it, rereading some texts and reading others for the first time. I mention this because, beyond the impulses of the consistent book buyer that I still am (every reader is a buyer), this act says something about my most enduring reading habits.
I can speak for the reader I once was—I’m not even sure we’re the same person anymore—and say that Vargas Llosa the intellectual inspired us to act in a certain way in the times we lived in. the writer instilled in us persistence and also exercises in admiration for our literary masters, and the politician led us to place honesty and consistency as principles anchored in experience, even if they often transcend the narrow framework of what we have lived through. I studied journalism, but I wrote poetry, and I saw in Vargas Llosa that it was not necessary to specialize in something, but rather to be curious about everything. When people ask me why my library is full of history books, socio-political essays, and biographies, given that I am a reader of fiction, something I also owe in some way to him and his novelistic knowledge, I say that it is because I am interested in everything, because I want everything, even if life is not long enough.
That reader who arrived at a Cuban university in 1992 and had heard that a novelist banned for being an “enemy of the Revolution” had run for president of Peru and lost—a photo of him with a stern expression appeared in some magazines at the time—had not yet read his books. It was there that I began a journey, taking Los cachorros as my starting point—those Pichula Cuéllar-type characters lingered for a long time—and concluding with the last letter read in the anthology of correspondence between the four greats of the boom, a journey that I wanted to be thorough and attentive, and thanks to which I acquired his main books, most of them new editions that traveled from Spain to my home thanks to friendly hands.
Most of those books stayed there in the lost library or I left them with a friend. Little by little, I have recovered some, but it is not so commendable, to be honest, because the hard part was getting them there amid censorship, police harassment, and the demanding customs of Castroism. Even today, resentment prevails over the impoverished cultural establishment on the island. I have been looking at its main media outlets on the Internet. I see uncredited articles in Cubadebate and Granma, which I assume are written or approved by the current director of the Casa de las Américas, an old acquaintance and true censor. Both sites publish lamentable obituaries that no one asked for, repeating the same old slanders and insults.
I have about twenty of his books on my shelves. At the center of most of them is Peru, that “sleeping country on which God’s wrath has cooled,” as Werner Herzog wrote. No one knows what would have happened if he had won the presidency—there is a pattern that repeats itself in recent Peruvian presidents, they all go to prison—the truth is that he left us a memorable testimony in El pez en el agua (1993), one of his first books, which, thanks to Spanish friends, I was able to obtain just a year after it was published and which circulated widely among my circle of friends in Cuba at the time, eager for any book of his that would break through the censorship barrier. In it, he talked about his formative years and laid the foundations for a memoir that he left unfinished. We don’t know if he ever completed it, but we hope he did, as he was a dedicated writer who never lost sight of what gave meaning to his life, but also of the vicissitudes of his presidential campaign and, incidentally, he mentions his break with another great figure of Peruvian literature, Julio Ramón Ribeyro. That book was his swan song. The most political Vargas Llosa had disappeared forever, and the novelist’s destiny prevailed.
He was the youngest and most ambitious of all the Boom writers, and he certainly allowed himself to be tainted by politics and vanity at times. But he had written novels that make great not only those who write them, but also those who immerse themselves in them and incorporate their powerful gallery of characters into their own particular tableau of affections and detachments. For me, for example, La ciudad y los perros, because of its complexity, its torrential construction, and its maturity, the greatest first novel we know of by a writer in any language in the 20th century, with the exception of Buddenbrooks, far greater than Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Voyage Out, The Stranger, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise, The Paying Guards, The Short Life, Nothing, The Guardian in the Wheat Field, Yawar Fiesta, Man Is a Dog, and Mr. President…
We are going to tire of reading all kinds of opinions about him, his person, and his work these days. Some will show their resentment; almost whenever his political drift is questioned, it is done from left-wing positions because they never forgave him for the challenge he posed by embracing liberalism and renouncing the comfort of the hegemonic cultural fold exercised by the left today, especially in the world of culture. He has been blamed for the absence of women writers in the boom, criticized for only meeting with politicians and people from the highest intellectual and social elite, when in reality he was always a writer who lived life to the fullest and in the end was only committed to “the profound aesthetic truth,” that is, “the Truth itself,” as Julio Cortázar said of him in a letter.
In a letter from 1966, García Márquez tells Vargas Llosa that he is surprised by the amount of material he uses in his novels, since with what is in The Green House, ten novels could have been written. The key to understanding these two novelistic destinies, these two ways of understanding how to narrate, appears very clearly here. The Colombian reaffirms a way of reading tradition by appealing to the magical-fantastic, to rituals of language, to dialogues conceived as sentences in a cosmos that is complex in its own way, but far from certain modern technical explorations of the novel. For the Peruvian, on the other hand, there is no dilemma: the novel is technical implosion, urban modernity, the hatching of narrative planes, long breath and difficulty. But we should also remember that Vargas Llosa never lacked humor: there are Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, and the reviled, although I enjoyed it very much at the time, Elogio de la madrastra. For one, the novel is music; for the other, it is architecture, cubism.
If everyone is talking about Vargas Llosa, about his legacy, recalling how and when they read his books, and also bringing up his miseries, it is because someone truly important has left us. Milan Kundera and Javier Marías, two great European novelists, also died not long ago, and yet they did not leave behind this feeling of total absence, of devastation in the abyss, of emptiness in a realm in clear decline and free fall, not to say already lost, which is that of literature as a universe of prestige and in which the consumption of fiction is being pushed aside by a logic that operates more towards images and less towards the written word. That universe has faded a little more with his death.
