Vargas Llosa: the last of the Mohicans remains a rebel

Writers and politicians, but more writers than politicians. This is how he celebrated his appointment as an honorary member of the French Academy. Mario Vargas Llosa He is the only member of this intellectual monastery who writes in Spanish. And it could not be otherwise. He had decided to be a writer at the age of twenty after having read Madame Bovary. Neither Borges nor Cervantes. He gave himself to Flaubert, simply, to throw himself into the arms of literature and never let go again.

And although one of the protagonists of “La Tía Julia y el escribidor” hated the Argentinians, it was the Argentinians who run the International Foundation for Freedom who organized the celebration for him at the Wellington bullfighting hotel in the district of Salamanca. The Economist Rosario Gerard Bongiovanni; his son Ignacio and the former Minister of Culture of Buenos Aires, Dario Loperfido. Guardians of liberal ideology in Ibero-America, they have Vargas Llosa as a banner of ideas that have long fought the intellectual battleground against progressives and orthodox leftists, on both sides of the Atlantic. Rarities of these times.

For what Gabo Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar there carlos fuentes they were left. The whole Latin American boom was progressive, it had followed the brief dream of the Spanish Republicans and had fallen in love with the revolution of Fidel. Vargas Llosa also drank from these waters and wrote against the military and the tyrants of the time. But the talented Peruvian was the first of all to be fed up with intolerance and revolutionary gulags.

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Much more than that. In 1990, he became the presidential candidate of the Peruvian right. The narrow universe of Latin American culture does not forgive him. And he undid it long before the internet came along and undo became the digital trap for free spirits. Vargas Llosa was tired; he left Peru and in 1993 he obtained Spanish nationality. His novels weren’t selling as well, but he never stopped writing.

In Madrid, he lives calmer, even if tranquility has never been his favorite country. As a symbol of the Libertad Foundation, he traveled to Argentina several times and a group of lunatics sponsored by Kirchnerism attacked him on top of a bus. They also wrote it when it was his turn to inaugurate the Buenos Aires Book Fair. He never shied away from conflict. And at the age when many are waiting to die, he abandons his wife Patricia to get closer to the eternal Isabel Preysler, subscriber to gossip magazines divorced from Julio Iglesias.

He still pays for these rebellions and the Madrid photographers do not let him wander serenely through its streets. A year and a half ago, he published an extraordinary text on old age, which he called The winds (due to the rebellion of bellies with age), and a paragraph in which the protagonist longed for his abandoned wife and cursed his frivolous current partner, was interpreted as an attack on the untouchable Preysler. Even the pomp of the French Academy does not prevent it from appearing in viral news on yellow sites. Not even on TV in the afternoon.

But the Vargas Llosa of this winter night in Madrid is the rebel celebrated by a handful of writers who no longer go back to the crucifixion of the left. Alternating slices of Iberian ham, cod croquettes and sushi rolls with beer or wine, it is acclaimed by the respected Javier Cercas and the indomitable Arturo Pérez Reverte. He is accompanied by the popular deputy Carlos Rojas and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, the Spanish-Argentinean who specializes in skeet shooting surly separatists and ultra-feminists.

Introduced by his son, journalist and essayist Alvaro, Vargas Llosa takes advantage of the banality of speeches to once again defend freedom. The Sergio Ramirez and of Mona Lisa Bellithe two Nicaraguan writers driven out of their country by the dictators Daniel Ortega there Rosario Murilloto which Spain, Colombia and (belatedly) Argentina are fighting to grant them citizenship.

The two become emotional in the heart of Madrid, having been exiled from Tacho Somoza, having been young militants of Sandinismo and having been punished for the very revolution they had romanticized. At 80 and 50, around here they can destroy the reputation of others, and they can also be destroyed, without their existence depending on it.

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More rarities from these times. The Ortega Murillos expelled a feather admired on the planet like that of Ramírez and gave Argentina a position in their decadent dictatorship Mario Firmenich, a former guerrilla and former Montonero leader, who sent hundreds of deceived young people to death and ended up being condemned by justice and pardoned by Peronism. He lived discreetly in Tarragona, far from the cardboard revolutions. Today, he is an adviser to dictators and pockets 50,000 US dollars a year from the Nicaraguan state. Argentinian talent doesn’t just belong to Lionel Messi.

“Vargas Llosa is the last of the Mohicans of the group of writers who transformed Latin American literature. And he is without a doubt the most complete novelist we have yet to appreciate. It will continue to be read in the centuries to come with the same avidity that we read it today”, explains Ramírez, watching the Nobel Prize winner greet everyone and achieve the feat of letting himself be photographed in hundreds of selfies without angry. Nobody wants to leave Wellington although Real Madrid return to Liverpool for a jaw-dropping Champions League game. Some are content to watch Karim Benzema’s goals on their mobile phone for a few seconds before rediscovering the disappearing pleasure of literature.

The Peruvian Vargas Llosa, with only a hearing aid that allows him to hear his admirers better, is the only living legend from a continent that caused astonishment with his literary volcano that they called boom. Cortázar left in the last century and could not enjoy more than two months of the newfound democracy in Argentina. García Márquez passed away in 2014, two years after Carlos Fuentes. And neither Rulfo, nor Donoso, nor the Paraguayan Roa Bastos. Only the man who wrote “The City and the Dogs” remains to lose a presidential election years later to the unknown Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese descendant elected president by the left. Soon after, the coup and the crackdown on those who voted for him would come. More and more rarities of these times.

When did Peru get screwed, Zavalita? The question of Vargas Llosa, which emerged like a knife in “Conversations in the Cathedral”, continues to be valid for almost all countries of the lost subcontinent. The Peruvian is convinced that all of Latin America is screwed today. And that the metaphor also applies to Argentina, the country of wasted opportunities which will arrive at the end of March.

In Buenos Aires, he will share the freedom dinner every year with leaders, economists and businessmen, and will listen Mauricio MacriA Rodriguez Larreta Already Patricia Bullrich promise the change of a destiny that is still too dark. The elections are very close and expectations are always permitted.

A few weeks ago, journalist Maite Rico gave Vargas Llosa a charming interview in the world newspaper in which the writer made it clear that he intended to keep fighting. The most difficult of all battles. The one that always ends in defeat. He describes, optimistic to the end, what literature represents in his life.

“I think that literature is an invention of human beings to defend themselves against death. It’s a way of hiding. That’s why he will survive. There, in the novel, you find an eternity which is fictitious, but which allows us to protect ourselves from what scares us, especially when we are old…”.

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