Redeemers (49 page)

Of the signatories to this letter of protest against the lack of political freedom in Cuba, Martin writes that “the American names are not especially impressive, apart from Susan Sontag, nor were the Latin American ones (no Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos, etc.).” Among the American authors who did not impress Martin were Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel; among the Latin Americans, Reinaldo Arenas (who composed the document), Ernesto Sabato, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Octavio Paz; among the Europeans, Juan Goytisolo, Federico Fellini, Eugene Ionesco, Czesław Miłosz, and Camilo José Cela. But his reaction is understandable. For the biographer and for his subject, “1989 would be the year of the apocalypse.”

Even more of a blow to Cuba's prestige (though not to its economy) than the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe was the much-talked-about verdict against Division General Arnaldo Ochoa and the brothers Antonio (Tony) and Patricio de la Guardia, on charges of drug trafficking and treason against the Revolution. This dark episode came to public attention in June 1989. According to the journalist Andrés Oppenheimer, the movement of drugs through Cuba began in 1986 and had the tacit blessing of Fidel, until the American intelligence services detected a compromised operation. Castro then took the opportunity to kill four birds with one stone: he could rid himself of a potentially serious rival (Ochoa was one of the supreme commanders of the intervention in Angola, a veteran of the incursions into Venezuela, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Nicaragua, and officially recognized as a “Hero of the Revolution”) along with the de la Guardia brothers, both of them Castro's friends and attached to the Ministry of the Interior under another “implicated party,” the division general José Abrantes. Fidel had entrusted Tony de la Guardia, his “protégé,” with multiple intelligence operations (such as the laundering of $60 million for Argentina's Montoneros in 1975, in payment for a kidnapping). It is hard to believe that this new venture—expressly ordered by Abrantes—did not enjoy Fidel's blessing, like everything on the island. But the end justified the means.

The remarkable fact is that Antonio de la Guardia, a character out of an action film, was also a close friend of García Márquez. One of his paintings hung in García Márquez's house in Havana. In that same year, 1989, Gabo dedicated
The General in His Labyrinth
to him: “For Tony, may he sow good.” On July 9, when the final verdict was about to be announced, Castro visited García Márquez at his house in Havana. Oppenheimer reconstructed fragments of the long conversation. “If they are executed,” García Márquez is reported to have said, “nobody on earth will believe it wasn't you who gave the order.” Later that night, the writer received Ileana de la Guardia, Tony's daughter, and her husband Jorge Masetti (the son of the late guerrilla leader Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an old friend and García Márquez's former boss at
Prensa Latina
). They had come to beg García Márquez to intercede on de la Guardia's behalf, to save his life. The writer said things like “Fidel would be crazy if he allowed the executions,” and raised their hopes. He told them not to worry, and advised them not to appeal to any human rights organizations. Four days went by. Then, on July 13, 1989, Gabo's good friend Tony de la Guardia and Ochoa were executed. Patricio was sentenced to thirty years in prison and Abrantes to twenty. The latter died of a heart attack in 1991.

Although he left Cuba before the executions, according to testimony collected by Ileana de la Guardia herself, García Márquez attended “part of the trial, along with Fidel and Raúl, behind the ‘great mirror' in the hall of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.” In Paris, during the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution, he told President François Mitterrand that it had all been just “a quarrel among officers.” Publicly he claimed to have “very good information” that the charges of treason were justified, and he observed that, given the situation, Castro had no alternative.

A few months before the events, writing the final pages of
The General in His Labyrinth
, García Márquez had re-created Simón Bolívar raving in his sleep as he remembers his order to shoot the brave mulatto general Manuel Piar, who had been invincible in his battles against the Spaniards and a hero of the masses. “It was the most savage use of power in his life,” García Márquez observes in his novel, “but the most opportune as well, for with it he consolidated his authority, unified his command, and cleared the road to glory.” And at the chapter's climax García Márquez puts his grandfather's words in Bolívar's mouth: “I'd do it all over again.”

“I don't publish any book these days,” García Márquez said sometime in the mid-1980s, “before the Comandante reads it.” Which is why, regarding the passage about Bolívar and Piar, Martin wonders, “Did he [Castro] remember it as he made his decision?” We can assume he must have read it. But given the “very good information” that García Márquez has always claimed to have about Cuba, and given his closeness to Antonio de la Guardia, the interesting questions concern not the Comandante but the writer. Was García Márquez unaware of his friend Tony's secret assignments? As he was writing his novel, did he even consider the possibility that his friend would be arrested on charges of purported “treason”?

And so an old cycle of complicity was complete. It began with an execution in the inner circle of the young García Márquez—his grandfather's shooting of his friend and military subordinate Medardo, the son of his lover—and it ended with another execution in his inner circle: the Comandante's sentencing of his friend Tony, the “sower of good.” The writer who, from an early age, adopted his grandfather's “political morality,” the one who “quite cold-bloodedly puts politics before morality,” the one who saw Castro as “a representation of his own grandfather . . . against whom he could not, would not dare, would not even wish, to win,” had been obliged to test his theory on himself as flesh and blood. And he had accepted the verdict of power.

 

THE FRIENDSHIP
and the lobsters have gone on for almost thirty years. Panegyrist, court advisor, press agent, ambassador-at-large, plenipotentiary representative, head of foreign public relations: García Márquez has been all these things for Castro. In 1996, he dined with President Bill Clinton and told him that “if you and Fidel could sit down face to face, there wouldn't be any problem left.”

Things were going fairly well for the writer and the Comandante, except at a few moments: 2003, for instance, when a movement more important and universal than democracy, the movement for human rights, seemed to come between them. In March of that year, in a sudden and devastating gesture, Castro's tribunal sentenced seventy-eight dissidents to anywhere from twelve to twenty-seven years in prison. (One of them was accused of possessing a Sony tape recorder.) Immediately thereafter, in the heat of the moment, he ordered the execution of three boys who had tried to flee the island on a ferry. Confronted with this state crime, José Saramago declared (though he later retracted his statement) that “this is as far as I go” in his relationship with Castro. But the writer Susan Sontag went further, and at the Bogotá Book Fair, she criticized García Márquez: “He's this country's greatest writer and I admire him very much, but it's unpardonable that he hasn't spoken out about the latest measures taken by the Cuban regime.”

In response, García Márquez seemed to distance himself somewhat from Castro: “Regarding the death penalty, I don't have anything to add to what I've said in private and publicly as long as I can remember. I'm against it in any place, for any reason, in any circumstances.” But almost immediately he distanced himself from his distancing: “Some media outlets—among them CNN—are manipulating and distorting my response to Susan Sontag, to make it seem like a statement against the Cuban Revolution.” For emphasis, he repeated an old argument, justifying his personal relations with Castro: “I can't count the number of prisoners, dissidents, and conspirators whom I've helped, in absolute silence, to get out of jail or emigrate from Cuba over the last twenty years at least.”

In “absolute silence” or in absolute complicity? Why would García Márquez have helped anyone leave Cuba if he did not consider their imprisonment unjust? And if he considered it unjust, to the extent of championing their cause, why did he continue—why does he still continue—to support a regime that commits such injustices? Wouldn't it have been more valuable to denounce the unjust incarceration of those “prisoners, dissidents, and conspirators” and help to focus international criticism on the Cuban treatment of political prisoners?

García Márquez does not write from an ivory tower. He claims to be proud of his work as a reporter. He promotes journalism at an academy in Colombia. He has asserted that the news story is a literary genre with the potential to be “not just true to life but better than life. It's as good as a story or a novel, but with one sacred and inviolable difference: novels and stories permit unlimited fabrication but news stories have to be true down to the last comma.” How, then, to reconcile this declaration of journalistic ethics with his own concealment of the truth in Cuba, despite his possession of privileged inside information?

Eventually history makes both aesthetic and moral judgments. Aesthetically speaking, it is a little premature to say—as Martin does—that García Márquez is the “new Cervantes.” But in moral terms, certainly, there is no comparison. A hero in the war against the Turks, wounded and maimed in battle, castaway and prisoner in Algeria for five years, Cervantes lived his ideals, his tribulations, and his poverty with Quixote-like integrity, and enjoyed the supreme freedom of accepting his defeats with humor. One does not see such greatness of spirit in García Márquez, who has avidly collaborated with oppression and dictatorship.

The beauties of the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez will survive the contorted loyalties of the man who created it. But it would be an act of poetic justice if, in the autumn of his life and at the zenith of his glory, he disassociated himself from Fidel Castro and put his influence at the service of the Cuban dissidents. There is no point in hoping for such a transformation, of course. It is the kind of thing that happens only in García Márquez novels.

 

 

9

Mario Vargas Llosa

CREATIVE PARRICIDE

Peru's noted modernist painter Fernando de Szyszlo, a close friend of Mario Vargas Llosa, attended the wake for Vargas Llosa's father, who died in January 1979. He has given us a description of the behavior of the great Peruvian novelist on that occasion: “When he came into the room where they were holding the wake for his father, Mario spent only a few seconds before the man stretched out in his coffin and, without saying a word, without a single gesture, rushed away.” Vargas Llosa is not only a novelist and short story writer but also an essayist, playwright, journalist, even a presidential candidate in the 1990 Peruvian elections. He is known throughout the world for the extraordinary quality of his writing but he is not fundamentally a happy man: “I write because I am not happy, I write because it is a way of struggling against unhappiness.”

The cause of this unhappiness can be traced to a central event in his life: the appearance, when he was ten years old, of a father he had always been told was dead. It would be a terrible reappearance, whose ominous shadow would condition a large part of his life. Literature is the means through which Vargas Llosa has been able to confront not only the unfortunate reality of his own country (and elsewhere in Latin America) but his personal history of anguish.

Peru, where Vargas Llosa was born, the ancient viceroyalty whose image some authors in the seventeenth century identified with the biblical Ophir (site of King Solomon's mines) or with the Garden of Eden itself, also had a traumatic past. In the Conquest of Mexico (between 1519 and 1521 in central Mexico) the Conquistadores perpetrated massacres; epidemics of European diseases decimated the Indians, and their labor was delivered en masse to the estates (
encomiendas
) assigned by royal decree to the victors. But the Conquest was followed by a “spiritual baptism” that eventually would have beneficial results for the future of the country. The monastic orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, incorporated the Indians into the new culture in a creative and generally peaceful way. The Spaniards and surviving Indians began to mingle in a process of “mixing the races” (
mestizaje
) that would eventually lead to a softening of racial distinctions. During the colonial period, explicit and multiple racial categories (the so-called
castas
) existed but would start to disappear in the nineteenth century. Mexico was not (and is not) free of racial prejudice, especially in an area like Chiapas with its heavily Indian population. But the idea of natural equality, fostered by the great “Apostle of the Indians” Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), had penetrated the culture to the extent that a dark-skinned Indian—Benito Juárez—could rise to be president of the republic as early as 1858.

The Conquest of Peru, from beginning to end, was marked by extreme brutality. Its course was set by the assassination of the Inca emperor Atahualpa, garroted at Pizarro's orders after he had already accepted Christianity, and the later execution of his nephew and the last independent Inca leader, Túpac Amaru, beheaded in public before thousands of wailing Indians. The coast was settled by the Spaniards (later, African slaves and Chinese laborers would arrive). In the mountains and the cold highland plateau, most of the population remained Indian. Not the ideas of Bartolomé de las Casas but the doctrine of his famous opponent, the scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, was the guideline for the Spaniards of Peru: the Indians were “slaves by nature.” Peru is not the only country of Latin America with distinct cultural and racial enclaves, but it has been historically one of the worst in maintaining the divisions, the distrust, the prejudice, and the ever-renewed violence, echoes of the extreme violence that gave birth to the Viceroyalty.

In his memoir,
El pez en el agua
(The Fish in the Water), Vargas Llosa describes the
variopinta
(“multicolored,” a frequent adjective in his writings) society of Peru:

 

White and cholo [the usual, somewhat disparaging word for a mestizo in the south of Latin America] are terms that mean more things than race or ethnicity . . . White (
blanco
) and cholo always apply to someone in comparison with someone else, because one is always worse or better situated than others, less or more poor or important, with features less or more western or mestizo or Indian or Asian than others, and all that savage nomenclature that decides a great part of the destinies of individuals is maintained thanks to an effervescent edifice of prejudices and feelings—disdain, contempt, envy, rancor, admiration, emulation—which is—underneath the ideologies, values and condemnations—the profound explanation of the conflicts and frustrations of Peruvian life.

 

His judgment of his country is harsh, both of its history and its people (by which he primarily means its non-Indian citizens), whom he describes as marked by “an ‘I' that is hidden and blind to reason, that is sucked in with its mother's milk and begins its formation from the first cries and stammerings of the Peruvian.” He both loves and despises Peru. At times he has promised to abandon the country and never write another word about it. Viewed from abroad, it has shamed him but no matter how angry he can be with his country, it is always present before his mind's eye. And he has wanted to liberate his country, first through literature and later through political action.

The complex, tumultuous, “multicolored” story of his life reads like one of his own novels. He was born in Arequipa, in the south of Peru, a city in an Andean valley and known for both its religious and revolt-prone nature. His mother, Dorita, was only nineteen years old when, on a visit to the city of Tacna, she met Ernesto J. Vargas, a minor employee of a radio station, ten years older than her. She rapidly fell in love with the man. Back in Arequipa, she began an intense, amorous correspondence that led to marriage, in 1935, a year after their initial meeting.

The newlyweds moved to Lima and, from the very beginning, Ernesto began to show disturbing traits of character. He practically imprisoned Dorita, forbade her to see her friends and especially her relatives. He would launch into jealous fits of rage. But even worse and more destructive was his pervasive social resentment. Though he was white-skinned, well built and blue-eyed, he was consumed with the conviction (in Vargas Llosa's words) that he came from “a family socially inferior to that of his wife.” And he manufactured a ferocious antipathy to his wife's family, which spilled into physical abuse of Dorita herself. Even within the context of Ernesto's twisted values, the antipathy had no basis. The Llosa family in Arequipa, though respected, were very far from being aristocrats. Very shortly after their marriage, Dorita became pregnant. Ernesto one day, in a casual manner, told her that she should go to her family in Arequipa, where her pregnancy could be better attended. He then never called her in Arequipa, never wrote, never attempted any contact. Four months later Mario was born. Some of Dorita's relatives finally found and spoke to Ernesto in Lima. His reaction was to send her a letter of immediate divorce. Besieged by the gossip and innuendoes of a closed-minded Catholic and provincial city, the family—Dorita with her baby of less than a year—moved to Cochabamba, in the fertile eastern valley of Bolivia, where Mario's grandfather raised cotton and was the Peruvian consul for the area.

The boy grew up “spoiled and pampered,” swathed in the love of the Llosa family. They told him his father was dead. He was given a photo of Ernesto and, each night after being put to bed, he would kiss the picture, saying good night “to my dear father who was in heaven.” There in Bolivia, he wrote his first childish verses, lavishly praised by the family. A man “whose memory I turn to whenever I feel very despairing about our species and am prone to believe that humanity, in the end, is a big heap of garbage,” his beloved grandfather Pedro taught him to memorize the poems of Rubén Darío. His mother, who was still, despite everything, in love with Ernesto, did not remarry.

In 1945, one of his uncles, the respected lawyer José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, was elected president of the republic. For the young Mario, he was a living example of decency and civic dedication:

 

The admiration I had as a child for that gentleman with a bow tie . . . I still have, because Bustamante . . . left power a poorer man than when he gained it, was tolerant with his adversaries and severe with his followers . . . and respected the laws to the extreme of committing political suicide.

 

Bustamante's election excited the Llosa family and changed their situation. Grandfather Pedro was named prefect of the city of Piura and the family returned to Peru. Living with his mother and his grandfather, the boy turned ten and would remember those days as a very happy time.

Recorded in his memory as nearly perfect, which often happens when one remembers a period immediately preceding a catastrophe, that pleasant world was torn apart one morning when Dorita informed the child that his father had not really died. On a visit to Lima, she had accidentally encountered Ernesto Vargas. The sight of him seemed to wipe away Dorita's memory of five and a half months of a miserable marriage and the ten years of silence. When Mario finally met his father, he had the feeling that it was a hoax. The man did not resemble the father he had imagined when he had thought the man was dead. It was in reality a prescient foreboding. Without any explanation, his parents loaded him into a car and swept him off to Lima, far from the Llosa family and ten years of a happy and protected life. The nightmare was barely beginning.

In Lima, for the first time in his life, he was lonely. “Fog-bound Lima, horrible Lima,” wrote the poet Sebastián Salazar Bondy. The boy read and read to escape his solitude during those first “sinister” months of 1947. Ernesto still nourished his irrational hatred for Dorita's family and could work himself up over the imagined slight of their mere existence: “when, turned furious with rage, he would launch himself against my mother, and would beat her, I really wanted to die, because even death seemed preferable to the fear I used to feel. He hit me too, sometimes.” Together with the terror his father inspired in him from those early days on, another emotion was stirring in him: hatred, though at the time he could not fully accept the word. Ernesto Vargas commanded Mario never to visit his relatives. And it greatly disturbed him when the boy went to Mass (which made Mario, for a time, turn religious to oppose his father). And the situation kept getting worse:

 

When he would beat me, I would totally lose control. Often, because I was terrified, I would humiliate myself before him and beg his pardon, clasping my hands together. But it wouldn't calm him. And he would go on beating me, screaming at me and threatening to put me in the army.

 

At various times, between 1947 and 1949, the mother and the child tried to escape from that inferno. Each time, Ernesto managed to persuade them to return. There would be a few days of calm. Then the rages and beatings would resume. One day, with Mario in the car, Ernesto pulled up at a corner and picked up two boys. “They're your brothers,” he said. They were the children of an American wife whom he had met during his separation from Dorita and had also abandoned (or she had left him).

These frustrated attempts at flight had one positive result. His father finally allowed Mario to spend weekends with his uncles and cousins who lived in Miraflores, a wealthy area of Lima. Those weekends were the best days of his adolescence. He attended dances, went out with girls, saw films, and socialized with boys from Miraflores. These friends and his mother's relatives became a second, much more welcome family.

Near the end of 1948, General Manuel Odría led a military coup that overthrew the democratic government of Mario's uncle Bustamante y Rivero and began the Ochenio de Odría (Eight Years of Odría), with its dictatorial emphasis on modernity and unmitigated nationalism. When Mario's uncle went into exile, his father celebrated the coup as if it were a personal victory. That same year, another decisive event occurred, connected in its way with religion. On the last day of courses in his preparatory school (run by the Salesian Fathers), Mario went to collect his grades and one of his teachers, Brother Leoncio, tried to sexually molest him. Mario left the room running and the event was enough to turn him permanently away from religion.

He would write love poems for one of his girlfriends (secretly, as a way of resisting his father, who would get angry when the boy wrote verses). As might be expected in a brutal (and certainly deeply insecure) macho like Ernesto, such sensitivity for him was the mark of a “queer.” It is likely that, without his father's contempt for literature, Mario might never have persevered in his writing, which began as a form of play but in time would become his vocation. Predictably, following the pattern of many a tyrannical Latin American father, Ernesto enrolled the boy, not yet fourteen, in a military school, to force him away from literature and “make a man out of him.” But for Mario, it was, in part, an opportunity: “enclosed within those bars corroded by the dampness . . . during those gray days and nights, amid the deeply depressing fog, I read and I wrote as I never had before and I began to be (although I didn't know it as yet) a writer.”

 

II

In his two years at the Leoncio Prado Military School (1950–51), Mario was enveloped in the “multicolored” society of Peru. There were boys with the faces of cholos, whites, Indians, boys from the mountains and the coast, from rich and poor homes. To make a little money (since he was twelve, his father had stopped giving him money) he composed little pornographic novels for his classmates and with the income earned, on his days off went to brothels and bought books in bulk, including the works of Alexandre Dumas, about whom he writes in his memoir: “From the images in those readings stemmed, I am sure, my preoccupation with learning to speak French and one day to go live in France.” For a time he thought of becoming a journalist, of making a living by writing, and did some reporting on crime for
La Crónica
. After two years in military school, Mario—in what can be justly be termed a Freudian slip—forgot the time limit on registration for the third and final year. And it was too late to register at any other school in Lima. Through his uncle Lucho in Piura, he was accepted at the Colegio San Miguel, where he would complete his high school (
secundaria
) education. In Piura he would grow close to his uncle Lucho, through whose influence he would combine a new social dimension with his growing commitment to literature. In his conversations with Uncle Lucho, he imbibed a consciousness “that Peru was a country of ferocious contrasts, of millions of poor people” and “a very vivid sense that such an injustice had to change and that the change would come through what was called the left, socialism, the revolution.” That year in Piura, free of military school and his abusive father, gave him respite and a creative impetus, central to the beginning of his development as a journalist and creative writer. It was the first stage for his personal liberation through literature. In Piura, he worked for the newspaper
La Industria.
At the same time, attracted by a newspaper announcement of a competition, he poured himself into writing a play:
La huida del Inca
(The Flight of the Inca), which would win a prize and be performed at the Teatro Variedades of Piura, directed by Mario himself, at the age of sixteen. And then, disappointing his family, who had hoped to see him enter the Catholic University of Lima, he chose (in 1952) to study law and literature at the public University of San Marcos, where he expected to make contact with revolutionaries “and become one of them.”