Redeemers (50 page)

 

POLITICS HAD
entered his life “at a gallop and with the burst of idealism and confusion it usually involves for a young man.” In the university he joined a communist cell. Under the Odría dictatorship, the party had been banned, and the communists, hiding their organization under the cover name of Cahuide (for an Inca warrior famous for having leaped to his death from the heights of the fortress of Sacsayhuamán rather than surrender to Pizarro), were trying to reconstruct the party in secret. Mario's group met in small cells, printed leaflets attacking the dictatorship, got into fights with student Apristas (militants of APRA, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, the nationalist revolutionary party of Raúl Haya de la Torre, also banned at the time), and tried to move the university toward support for workers' strikes. Mario took the covert name of “Comrade Alberto,” read the classic (and some heretical) Marxist works, and participated in a workers' strike (which he would later transform into literature in his first published work of fiction, in 1959, a collection of short stories titled
Los jefes
, and translated into English as
The Cubs and Other Stories
). But he soon found himself at odds with the dominating leftist dogmas of that period, the absolute dominion of Stalinist rigidity in politics and of social realism in literature. When he praised the prose of
Les nourritures terrestres
(The Fruits of the Earth) by André Gide, his comrades called him a “sub-man”:

 

It was that, in part, that got me fed up with Cahuide. When I stopped going to cell meetings, around June or July of 1954, I had been bored for a long time with the inanity of what we were doing. I didn't believe one word of our class analyses, and our materialist interpretations—though I didn't say this in any emphatic way to my comrades—seemed to me puerile, a catechism of stereotypes and abstractions.

 

He describes his political enthusiasm in those years as “considerably greater than my ideological coherence.” Perhaps for that reason, when a Christian Democratic Party was formed in 1956, he joined it. He even wrote speeches for Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the party's presidential candidate. His political passion was based on eclectic reading and admiration for individuals; he venerated Sartre just as he did Bustamante y Rivero. About his time as a Christian Democrat, he would later comment:

 

What the hell was I doing there, among these unbelievably respectable people, light years away from the Sartrean priest-bashers, me a lefty, not completely cured of all the Marxist notions . . . I still kept feeling? . . . Nevertheless, I stayed with the Christian Democrats because their fight against the dictatorship and in favor of the democratization of the country was impeccable.

 

Vargas Llosa has always shown a consummate ability to transform the events of his life into enduring literature. He used his experiences at Leoncio Prado, the student violence he witnessed there, for his novel
La ciudad y los perros
(The City and the Dogs), and his apprenticeship as a reporter—with the free-living life that accompanied it—in one of his earlier, most respected works,
Conversación en la catedral
(Conversation in the Cathedral), published when he was thirty-three years old, in which he also began to exact literary vengeance on his father, through the character of a selfish and overbearing father figure who takes his place in a gallery of the fundamentally evil, life-destroying rulers of Peru (and also a secret homosexual, as if to fling Ernesto Vargas's gibes back in his face). The book is perhaps the culminating literary product of his time as a leftist (his politics would change radically as he grew older), a period that really began in 1952, while he had been reporting on crime for
La Crónica
. There he became friends with Carlos Ney Barrionuevo, director of the newspaper's literary supplement, and through Ney was introduced to the work of two writers who would become essential influences: André Malraux, a man of action and beautifully sonorous prose, and most especially Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ideas on the need for political and social commitment in a writer would leave deep traces on Mario's future life. Much later, in 2001, in his book of essays
Literature and Politics
, he would describe his feelings in those days:

 

What did it mean to be committed—a key word of the period in which I began to write my first texts—to commit ourselves as writers? It meant to assume, before anything else, the conviction that by writing we not only were materializing a vocation, through which we would realize our most intimate longings, a mental and material predisposition that existed within us, but that we were also, by means of that vocation, exercising our obligations as citizens and, in some way, participating in that marvelous and elevating enterprise of resolving problems, of bettering the world.

 

A MUCH
more serious matter for his family was his ill-timed elopement with his maternal aunt (by marriage) Julia Urquidi in 1955. Mario was nineteen, Julia ten years older. It seemed like another characteristic event in the heated emotional universe of the Llosas, an amorous rapture, a festive and almost crazy transgression, as if he were inverting (he seemed the one most madly in love) and compensating for the disaster of his father and mother's entanglement. Faithful to his character, Ernesto reacted “like a rabid dog,” and Julia had to flee, for a time, to Bolivia. Twenty-two years later, Vargas Llosa would give his fictionalized version in hindsight of this passionate affair in a novel full of humor and feeling—in a very different vein, though no less intelligent and creatively impressive than his great, deadly serious masterpieces:
La tia Julia y el escribidor
. The title and work have been translated as “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” though
escribidor
is more properly “scribbler” or “third-rate writer,” and the novel intercuts the narrator's love for an “older woman” with the story of a noted hack writer of immensely successful radionovelas, as formulaic and sentimental as present-day telenovelas, who gradually goes insane and starts to confuse and muddle together the wildly disparate banalities of a number of soap opera scripts he had previously managed to produce almost simultaneously but still maintained as separate narratives. Material for this second thread also came from Mario's experience laboring for a time—among his many jobs—on radionovelas.

With his wife, Julia, still in Bolivia to avoid Ernesto's frenzied determination to prosecute her legally, Mario published his first stories, worked as a journalist, and continued his studies in literature while the law component of his university concentration interested him hardly at all. He would work many temporary “jobs that feed you,” some of them supremely dull (behind the counter of a bank or registering graves in a cemetery). Others were truly valuable to him, even fruitfully formative. For three and a half hours a day, across a period of four and a half years, he worked for the eminent historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea and learned Peruvian history from the ground up, more thoroughly and profoundly than he could from any classes he attended at San Marcos. Then came the chance to realize a long-held dream. Thanks to a short story competition sponsored by the
Revue Française,
he earned a trip to the “city of light,” Paris itself. On his return, he graduated in literature, with a thesis on the poetry of Rubén Darío. And more important than his academic experience was his ever-widening path through the world of letters. He explored various genres (including another play) and established friendships with noted Peruvian authors. Though at first he had disdained the “formalism” of Borges, he soon began to admire him. He continued to be dazzled by the skills of Malraux, and Sartre had converted him to the ethic of “commitment.” But his discovery of William Faulkner was much more important to his development. The American southerner offered him the gift of a new conception of form. From him Vargas Llosa absorbed “the serpentine language, the chronological dislocation, the mystery and profundity and the restless ambiguities and psychological subtleties which that form [of Faulkner's] can lend to narratives.”

In 1959, news arrived from Spain. His first published book, the short story collection
Los jefes,
had won the Leopoldo Alas Prize. That same year, he moved with his wife to Paris, where he would work teaching Spanish at a Berlitz school and produce journalistic pieces for Agence France-Presse and Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. A new world was opening for the couple and Mario launched himself into his writing.

 

III

Mario Vargas Llosa was, at first, an enthusiastic partisan of the Cuban revolutionary victory: “considering Cuba as a model that could be followed by Latin America . . . never before had I felt an enthusiasm and so powerful a feeling of solidarity for a political event.” Already, in 1958, he had written manifestos in favor of
los barbudos
. He was in Paris on the night of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and he went out into the streets to celebrate the new year and the new era. In 1962, he made his first trip to the island and then went to Mexico, as a correspondent for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted onto the front pages and television screens. The French asked him to return to Cuba, where he spent some anxious days as the prospect of an American invasion (or bombardment) seemed imminent. He saw the American planes flying low over the island. The prospect of immolation flew through the air with them and Mario donated blood for the possible victims. Fortunately, America and Russia (over the heads of the Cubans) reached a resolution that forestalled an armed, perhaps nuclear confrontation. When he returned to France, his first novel,
La ciudad y los perros,
won the Biblioteca Breve Prize, awarded by the prestigious Spanish publishing house Seix Barral. Two years later, he would return for some months to Peru, make a brief but intense trip into the eastern jungle (it would give him material for his novel
La casa verde
, The Green House), and use the opportunity of distance from Paris to divorce Julia Urquidi. Shortly afterward, he would marry another family member, his cousin Patricia Llosa, who would be his faithful companion from then on.

In the beginning, the Cuban Revolution had shown a breadth, pluralism, and flexibility in the area of culture that drew the respect of most of the intellectual and artistic world. But there were disturbing omens, even at the outset. The cultural publication
Lunes de Revolución
(Monday of Revolution), directed by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, had closed in November 1961. And yet, Vargas Llosa would remember, “nobody talked about it, there was a kind of pact of silence in the air. Cabrera Infante himself behaved like a diplomat in Paris in 1965.” Vargas Llosa would visit the island five times and gradually begin to distance himself from the Cuban Revolution. In the end he would come to see its government as an “authoritarian system, vertical, without freedom of the press” and “in no way what image, publicity and hope wanted to make us see.”

In 1966 he visited the Soviet Union, where he attended a meeting of the Writers' Union that surprised him with its bureaucratic rigidity. And he noticed the long lines in front of stores, the privileges accorded to the bureaucrats, the ugliness of the architecture. Nevertheless, when he made his third trip to Cuba, in 1967, he was still under the spell of the revolution and agreed to join the Board of Contributors to the influential publishing house Casa de las Américas. The decision marked the high point of his commitment to revolutionary Cuba. He participated in a collective interview with Fidel Castro, who displayed his most likable persona, promising to rapidly correct whatever his critics pointed out to him. Vargas Llosa was impressed. In his collection
Sables y utopías
(Sabers and Utopias), of 2009, he writes:

 

Fidel, as he spoke, referred many times to Marx, to Lenin, to historical materialism, to the dialectic. Nevertheless, I have never seen a Marxist less attached to the use of formulas and crystallized schemes . . . If there was one thing about which I was absolutely convinced during that sleepless night, it was Fidel's love for his country, the sincerity of his conviction that he was acting for the benefit of his people.

 

Then an incident occurred that somewhat dimmed his fascination with the Cuban Revolution. Without his knowledge, his editors had nominated him for Venezuela's Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Venezuela had been invaded in that year, unsuccessfully, by a small guerrilla force linked to Cuba. Vargas Llosa, learning about his nomination for the literary prize and maintaining his sympathy for the Cuban regime, was disturbed by the possible connection of his name with Venezuela and its liberal president, Raúl Leoni. He mentioned his dilemma to Alejo Carpentier, who was then the Cuban cultural attaché in Paris. Carpen-tier proposed that Vargas Llosa, if he won the prize, should make a donation to the struggle led by Che Guevara, who was then somewhere in the mountains of Bolivia. Carpentier argued that it would make a great impression throughout Latin America. He then read him a letter from Haydée Santamaría, whose status as a comrade of Fidel Castro in the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 (an action that foreshadowed the Cuban Revolution) had earned her near mythical fame and who was now a very powerful bureaucrat in the Cuban cultural ministry. She indicated that if Vargas Llosa made the contribution, the government, which understood that “a writer has needs,” would return the money secretly to him, so that he would lose nothing. Vargas Llosa was surprised and indignant at this request for a charade. But when he did receive the prize, he included praise of the Cuban Revolution in his acceptance speech and explicitly stated his commitment to socialism.