 |
| Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Restless Realism
Mario Vargas Llosa’s imagined lives.
Vargas Llosa has filled his books with enough personal refractions to remind one of Alberto Moravia’s sense of the novel as “higher autobiography.” But if he has a genuine alter ego, an escapist projection of himself, it is the character of Don Rigoberto, introduced, in 1988, in a slender Ovidian tale called “In Praise of the Stepmother” and revived, a decade later, in “The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto” (1997). A Lima insurance executive by day, Rigoberto is by night a “libertarian hedonist,” enveloped in books and music and baroque sexual activity with his voluptuous second wife, Doña Lucrecia. He dictates her hairdressing and her jewelry, then orchestrates their erotic role-play with highbrow connoisseurship, directing Lucrecia to play figures painted by Titian and Boucher and Jordaens. Told in comically overdone prose (“We will take our pleasure in that half twilight that already is raping the night”), the couple’s adventures are enhanced by a comely housemaid named Justiniana and threatened by Don Rigoberto’s pre-adolescent and highly sexualized son, Fonchito, a cross between Tadzio and Lucifer whom his stepmother can’t resist.
In Don Rigoberto’s view, all things should lead to sex and “sovereignty,” a “horrendous glory” from which all civic responsibility disappears in favor of a fetish-fed “expression of human particularity.” In its mannered explicitness, “In Praise of the Stepmother” feels like something one prints privately and gives to a lover. For Vargas Llosa, it may have been a personal getaway, the release of an imaginative safety valve when he most needed it. As he readied the book for publication, a couple of years past his fiftieth birthday, he was preparing to run for the Presidency of Peru.
Vargas Llosa was born in 1936, in the southern city of Arequipa. He spent his early years being happily indulged by his mother’s family, the Llosas, after she was deserted by her struggling and sometimes violent husband, Ernesto Vargas. (Mario was allowed to believe that his father had died.) According to the author’s memoir, “A Fish in the Water” (1993), the Llosas “had been well-off and possessed of aristocratic airs” before a gentle descent into the middle class. His grandfather was related to José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, the Peruvian President who was ousted in a military coup by General Manuel Odría in 1948.
After a “secret reconciliation” with his wife, Ernesto Vargas reëntered his son’s life when Mario was eleven. “The nightmare of my childhood” began at that point, the author later recalled. Ernesto limited Mario’s contact with the Llosas (he resented their “airs” and their pampering of his son), and subjected him to verbal abuse and beatings. Eventually, Mario was sent to a military academy in Lima. The school provided the setting for Vargas Llosa’s first novel, “The Time of the Hero” (1962), the story of cadets who demonstrate all manner of gross, and even murderous, cruelty. For years, legend had it that, upon publication, a thousand copies had been burned on the academy grounds.
As a university student in the mid-nineteen-fifties, during the Odría dictatorship, Vargas Llosa made secret forays into political activity, joining a cell of Communists and contributing to an underground Marxist journal on “international subjects from the ‘proletarian’ and ‘dialectical’ point of view.” This mind-set helped make him a devotee of Gabriel García Márquez, about whom he published a lengthy book in 1971, and of Fidel Castro, but neither of these enthusiasms would survive the nineteen-seventies. The first ended with the Peruvian writer giving the Colombian a black eye. (The two of them made a pact never to speak of what provoked Vargas Llosa’s punch, though one popular theory suggests that García Márquez slept with his acolyte’s wife.) The attraction to Castro, whom Vargas Llosa had seen as a “romantic guerrilla leader,” turned into implacable moral opposition, a view of the dictator as “a little satrap with bloodstained hands.”
Vargas Llosa passed much of Latin America’s literary “Boom”—the years that made writers like García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes more than hemispherically famous—in Europe, teaching, translating, working in broadcast journalism, and publishing novel after novel. His literary predilections were, in great measure, European and North American, and, while he tried out some of the same narrative experiments as other Boom writers, his defection from the left made him a political outlier. Spain became his second, adopted homeland; years later, recalling its emergence from Francoism, he spoke of his discovery that “when good sense and reason prevail and political adversaries set aside sectarianism for the common good, events can occur as marvelous as the ones in the novels of magic realism.” He came to cherish incrementalism, and to view the history of his own country through a democratic, reformist lens. In an essay called “Fiction and Reality in Latin America,” he discerned even in the conquest of the Incas a message more anti-dictatorial than anti-imperialist: “The vertical and totalitarian structure of the Tahuantinsuyu was, without doubt, more of a threat to its survival than all the conquistadors’ firearms and iron weapons.”
During the nineteen-eighties, Peru began to crumble from corruption, drug violence, and terror attacks by the Maoist Shining Path movement. In “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” (1984), a novel set a few years into the future, the narrator declares, “Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in illusion. . . . Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.” And yet it was at this moment that Vargas Llosa slowed his prodigious literary output and allowed himself to catch the “disease” of practical politics. “A Fish in the Water” chronicles his role in forming the Democratic Front, the party that ran him for President in 1990. Vargas Llosa saw the threat of totalitarianism in the rigid state-driven economy and the nationalizations imposed by the ruling American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. He instead proposed a “radical liberalism,” an array of free-market reforms, and a revitalization of civil liberties.
The campaign was chaotic and thrilling. The novelist fended off lies about his finances, threats to his life, and attacks on the supposed depravity of his books: “In Praise of the Stepmother” was read, one chapter per day, during prime time on government-run television. Slender and elegant, the author-candidate looked more patrician than he actually was, and couldn’t overcome a cool, Kennedyesque refusal to be carried on his supporters’ shoulders, “a ridiculous custom of Peruvian politicians in imitation of bullfighters.” Vargas Llosa was asking to lead a nation that he was beginning to recognize as “not one country, but several, living together in mutual mistrust and ignorance, in resentment and prejudice, and in a maelstrom of violence.”
On the verge of becoming as famous an artist-politician as Václav Havel, Vargas Llosa managed to finish first in the initial round of balloting, only to lose the second, badly, to Alberto Fujimori, an agricultural engineer of Japanese ancestry, who came so quickly out of nowhere—promising “Honesty, Technology and Work”—that his advent, too, seemed more “literary” than political. During the next decade, Fujimori delivered a species of economic reform, but he brought with it a nonmilitary dictatorship, shutting down Peru’s congress and gutting its courts. When Vargas Llosa called for international action against him, the novelist was threatened with the loss of his citizenship.
Mad Peru hurt Vargas Llosa into fiction long before it pushed him toward politics. In fact, his pursuit of the first probably assured his failure at the second, since, as he himself has argued, “good literature always ends up showing those who read it . . . the inevitable limitation of all power to fulfill human aspirations and desires.”
From its beginnings, the novel has been the most democratic and bourgeois of all art forms; it has almost always failed in the service of programmatic politics, let alone totalitarianism, because it grows from what Vargas Llosa calls, in his memoir, the “sordid warp and woof of which daily life is woven for the majority of mortals.” In a primer on writing with the Rilkean title “Letters to a Young Novelist” (1997), Vargas Llosa describes the composition of fiction as a “backwards striptease,” in which an author puts imaginative garments onto the naked autobiographical basis of his every production. What he has typically done in his own work is not to make the personal political but—even before his apostasy from the left—to render the political personal, shrinking it down to human size by inserting an analogue of himself into the commotion of public events.
“Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969), one of Vargas Llosa’s important early books, features Santiago Zavala, a feckless, more passive version of the author in his youth. (Like his protagonist, the teen-age Vargas Llosa worked for the Lima newspaper La Crónica.) Santiago’s Peru is “all fucked up,” yet it is still, he tells us, “my Peru,” not an abstract body politic but a welter of small disasters and compromises. The “Cathedral” of the novel’s title refers to the dive bar in which Santiago has a long session of reminiscence with Ambrosio Pardo, a black man at the bottom of Peru’s racial pyramid, who has served as a chauffeur to both Santiago’s father and Cayo Bermúdez, a fictional version of the Odría regime’s security director. As the book leaps from subject to subject—a failed coup attempt; the adventures of Bermúdez’s lesbian mistress; the secret homosexual life of Santiago’s father; the murder of a radio singer and carnival queen—Santiago realizes what La Crónica’s Weegee-like crime reporter already knows: there “weren’t any pure people in the world.” Humans, to him, are just another type of “fauna,” a word that Vargas Llosa went on to use in novel after novel, not with detachment or revulsion but, rather, with a sort of zookeeper’s tenderness for his charges.
Despite continual manipulations of structure and narrative, this great writer of fiction has never been a great formalist. Much of his first novel, about the military academy, is given over to Joycean streams of recitation, the boys’ resentments rippling over one another. Its characters end up seeming like a chorus without a cast, and the book obligated more to technique than to the moral inquiry that generated it. The tremendous vividness of “Conversation in the Cathedral” has to be similarly glimpsed in flashes, amid the narrative’s almost constant chronological shuffle. The novel is driven, and sometimes strangled, by a technique that the young Vargas Llosa developed partly through the influence of what he has called the “communicating vessels” of “Madame Bovary” and Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms”: the braiding of multiple episodes, or, in Vargas Llosa’s case, dialogues, on the same page, an alternation designed to squeeze in as much irony and resonance as the contrasting materials can produce. The effects are often more soupy than symphonic, but Vargas Llosa has compulsively retained the method, to the point of its becoming a trademark.
Vargas Llosa’s truest gifts have operated when he’s given in to what he has called, in his memoir’s doubly apologetic phrasing, “an invincible weakness for so-called realism.” A youthful uncertainty about his stature relative to both the magical realists and the earlier modernists—who, like Virginia Woolf, decried reality’s “cheapness”—lingered, though by the time he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2010, he was willing to acknowledge that “scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy.” Before he could make such a declaration, however, he had a series of literary shadows to step out of. Called “the fierce little Sartrean” during his youth (“I thought, very naïvely, that serious literature never smiled,” he has said), he worked hard to shed the lugubriousness that had earned him the nickname.
One result was “Captain Pantoja and the Special Service” (1973), an absurdist comedy set just after the Odría years, and another novel that was used against Vargas Llosa during the Presidential campaign. The dutiful Pantoja is assigned to set up a military brothel that the brass hope will reduce sexual assaults by Peruvian soldiers serving in the Amazon region, an effort that leads him to new heights of lust and self-respect as the ever-expanding operation becomes “the most efficient unit of the armed forces.” The author can’t resist pouring some of his dialogues through his “communicating vessels,” but it is usually a more graphic and exuberant exchange of fluids that the novel takes for its business.
The same high comedy is on display in “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” (1977), Vargas Llosa’s fullest fictional reconstruction of his Lima youth. Its protagonist, Mario, goes to work at Radio Panamericana (the hustling Vargas Llosa did that, too), where he comes under the spell of Pedro Camacho, “the Balzac of Peru,” the prodigious author of the station’s soap operas. From Camacho, Mario learns to let “contrast, not continuity, be the ruling principle of composition: the complete change of place, milieu, mood, subject, and characters.” Though this may sound like the equivalent of Vargas Llosa’s own alternations and narrative shifts—the station manager objects to Camacho’s “modernist gimmicks”—Camacho’s transitions are a matter not of painstaking design but of manic, uncontrollable movement, suggestive of the whirligig that art, life, and the subconscious all ride together.
“Aunt Julia” is a silly, first-rate book, capacious enough to make room even for some touches of magical realism: Camacho’s suitcase could no more hold all the acting costumes that are said to be in it than the single valise in García Márquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” could contain nearly two thousand unopened love letters. As the novel quickens and builds, the soap-opera plots get tangled. The pharmaceutical salesman who had the road accident morphs into the pensión owner stabbed by a crazy boarder, before presenting himself as a potential husband for the woman who began carrying her brother’s child many episodes before. Like Vargas Llosa, Mario weds the much older, juicy, and brash sister-in-law of his uncle. (Vargas Llosa’s more enduring second marriage was to a cousin.) Camacho’s inability to unsnarl the threads of his soap operas mirrors Vargas Llosa’s admission, decades later, that he can no longer distinguish “memories and flights of fancy” in the details of Mario’s autobiographical story line.
As a young man, Vargas Llosa thought of becoming a historian, and he developed a colorful, Carlylean sense of the field’s possibilities. Even after he committed himself to fiction, the desire to find a deep-seated cultural explanation for Peru’s political failures periodically drove him into the country’s past. In “The Dream of the Celt” (2010), he imagined the early-twentieth-century investigation by the British consul Roger Casement into the atrocities committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company’s “rubber barons” against indigenous laborers. The novel also follows Casement, an Irish nationalist, as he is vilified for the homosexual encounters described in his journals and eventually executed for treason. The material is rich, but the conundrums particular to historical fiction here trip up the novelist. “The Dream of the Celt” was so arduously researched that it reads almost entirely like nonfiction, with dialogue stilted by exposition and a detached point of view that keeps Casement’s tumultuous inner life at an oddly chilly remove.
A few decades before the Boom, Peru’s Indigenista movement sought to locate the country’s literary identity in tribal lore and native legends. Though leery of the “demagoguery and aestheticism” that sentimental primitivism can engender, Vargas Llosa nonetheless tried coming to terms with the movement’s legacy in “The Storyteller” (1987). The book’s narrator goes off in search of a friend from university days, an ethnologist who has deliberately lost himself inside the Machiguenga tribe along the Amazon. “This, too, was Peru,” the narrator says, “a world still untamed, the Stone Age, magico-religious cultures, polygamy, head-shrinking . . . that is to say, the dawn of human history.” Vargas Llosa blends his quest with tales from the hablador, or tribal storyteller, that his friend has become, immersing the reader in a wearying flow of creation stories, conversations with fireflies, and fabulist factoids: “When you cook a talking monkey, the air is filled with the smell of tobacco, they say.”
Vargas Llosa’s more striking encounters with politics and history have come when, looking for material, he has left Peru. He found his most consuming subject for historical fiction over the Brazilian border, in the eighteen-nineties Canudos insurrection. Under the sway of a magnetic preacher known as the Counselor, a band of rebels in the state of Bahia had defied the new Brazilian federal republic to form a breakaway state that abolished property and championed both free love and religious devotion. It took the republic four savage military expeditions before the settlement at Canudos—today an artificial lake—was wiped out. Vargas Llosa’s rendition of this episode, in “The War of the End of the World” (1981), his longest book and his personal favorite, is a horrifying epic of castration, rape, gangrene, and vultures—the brutal and pointless suppression of a harum-scarum utopia peopled with ex-slaves, healers, outlaws, peddlers, and pilgrims.
One might expect Vargas Llosa to identify with the cultured, skeptical baron whose hacienda is torched during the conflict, and who sees politics as “an inane, depressing occupation.” But his surrogate turns out to be a “nearsighted journalist,” who, during the mayhem, lets himself be galvanized from timid chronicler to ecstatic adherent. The novelist does much the same. Moments of the book are madly compelling—unlike “The Storyteller” or the Casement novel, it feels driven by obsession, not obligation—but the allegorical dimension that Vargas Llosa hoped for (“We have a living Canudos in the Andes,” he pointed out, with the Shining Path in mind) is never clearly focussed; the material is too religious and outré, and the writer’s ability to give his heart to the rebellion isn’t an expression of his democratic stance but a vacation from it.
Another twenty years passed before Vargas Llosa found his way to his political masterpiece, “The Feast of the Goat” (2000), a blazing re-creation of the 1961 assassination that put an end to Rafael Trujillo’s three-decade rule in the Dominican Republic. Avoiding the biographical trap of his Casement book, he focusses as much on Trujillo’s henchmen, sycophants, and assassins as on the strongman himself, who is richly bedevilled by the Church, his prostate, and the advent of John F. Kennedy. Parts of the novel are realized with the specificity of a roman à clef—the dictator’s most reliable and physically repulsive flunky, a man whose multiple offices and vile manners are rendered in squalidly funny Homeric catalogues, is said to be based on a Fujimora-era Peruvian congressman. Yet it achieves its grandeur through the fictional Urania Cabral, a woman who returns to Santo Domingo decades after her father, an official seeking to recover from a temporary loss of favor, pimped her out to the dictator. Emotionally cauterized by the experience, she reappears in middle age to confront her dying parent. She recalls the night of her proffering, when Trujillo recited Neruda’s poetry and poured out his troubles:
She tried not to look at his body, but sometimes her eyes moved along his soft belly, white pubis, small, dead sex, hairless legs. This was the Generalissimo, the Benefactor of the Nation, the Father of the New Nation, the Restorer of Financial Independence. The Chief whom Papa had served for thirty years with devotion and loyalty, and presented with a most delicate gift: his fourteen-year-old daughter.
“The Feast of the Goat” operates in a way that is more personal than panoramic; it remains intimate and local, a character-driven tale instead of a conscious historical enterprise, and in so doing it becomes the first great political novel of the twenty-first century.
For nearly sixty years, Vargas Llosa has been welcoming a character called Lituma, a police sergeant from the city of Piura, into his immense, restless œuvre. He first appears in “A Visitor,” a short story from the mid-nineteen-fifties, tying up a suspect and observing that he doesn’t think it will rain. He shows up more fully in Vargas Llosa’s second novel, “The Green House” (1965), where we learn of his youthful stretch in jail; of how his wife became a prostitute; and of how he once foolishly started a game of Russian roulette. Even so, the Sergeant Lituma who endures over decades in book after book is mostly a malleable, decent Everyman, a mixed-race cholo stuck in the middle of Peru’s race arrangements, a good-natured grunt with whom Vargas Llosa has little autobiographical kinship but about whom he was almost certainly thinking in 1990, as he appealed to voters by the million.
In “Who Killed Palomino Molero?” (1986), a brief detective novel set in the fifties, Lituma works a case with a Lieutenant Silva; he suffers nightmares, worries that he’s too fearful for the work he’s doing, and begins feeling a need to understand evil. He rises to eponymous status only once, in 1993, in “Lituma en los Andes” (published in English as “Death in the Andes”), a novel in which Vargas Llosa makes him endure a hazardous posting in a former mining town now beset by the murders and kidnappings of the Shining Path. Lituma may have transgressed since he was last seen by the reader—he’s only a corporal here—but his heart retains an elemental decency. Homesick for Piura, prone to falling in love with hookers, he assuages his loneliness and lust by listening to the erotic adventures of his deputy. He waits to be killed or kidnapped himself, and wonders, as did more sophisticated people in the same period, whether only magic can explain the violence around him.
It is hard to imagine Vargas Llosa’s new novel without Lituma. Although it contains up-to-the-minute references to Justin Bieber and social media, “The Discreet Hero” feels retrospective in a personal and perhaps valedictory way, a fulfillment of themes and characters that have populated his work for decades. Much of it is set in Lituma’s Piura, now a fast-developing and prosperous city. The sergeant is said to have a double chin and to be “close to fifty now”—never mind that a less novelistic math would put him nearer to a hundred. Living alone in a boarding house, he is poor, in part, because he is fundamentally honest: he has never taken a bribe, even though, in these post-Fujimori years, the country is awash in venality, beset by kidnappings that are no longer political but, rather, the means by which to make a bigger financial killing. Lituma blames things on all the money coming over the border from Ecuador and sighs about the supposed “price of progress.”
“The Discreet Hero,” an energetic book with a more straightforward narrative method than almost any other Vargas Llosa novel, centers on an extortion plot against the self-made owner of a local transport company, a good man who refuses to pay, and whose son and mistress may be in on the crime. It also brings the return of Don Rigoberto, the irresponsible aesthete through whom Vargas Llosa mentally dodged some of the worst of the Peruvian eighties. Still bemoaning the “barbarism” of the country beneath his window, Rigoberto is now sixty-two and ready to retire from the insurance company. His son, Fonchito, however, is maturing with the same magic-realist slowness as Lituma: he should be easily past thirty but is still no more than fifteen, driving Don Rigoberto and Doña Lucrecia to distraction with tales of an older man who keeps mysteriously appearing to him. The parents finally put their doubts about his story into the hands of a private eye and a shrink; the possibility is even raised that this precocious sexual manipulator may have had a spiritual experience and become an angel.
“The Discreet Hero” is most memorable for its optimism (Silva, for whom Lituma still works, cracks his case), and for the way in which Don Rigoberto is forced away from his etchings and phonograph records and into the “sordid warp and woof” of the world he has scorned. “My God,” he thinks, “what stories ordinary life devised; not masterpieces to be sure, they were doubtless closer to Venezuelan, Brazilian, Colombian, and Mexican soap operas than to Cervantes and Tolstoy. But then again not so far from Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, or Bénito Pérez Galdós.” He even seems willing to accept the happy ending that Vargas Llosa offers, one that invites this old rejectionist to remain, like the author, a fish in the water. As his family takes off on a trip, Don Rigoberto feels “reconciled with his son, with life. They had risen above the cloud cover and a radiant sun lit the interior of the plane.”
Vargas Llosa has said that his first childhood compositions were continuations of things he had read. As he approaches eighty, his works are the extension of things he has already written. He remains fundamentally true to his earthy, non-utopian vision: what lies below Don Rigoberto’s sun-filled plane is what the author long ago accepted as an ideal of imperfection, a world “made up of relative truths, in permanent dialogue,” always in medias res and never looking for the revolutionist’s Year Zero.
The new book is actually the only one in whose title Vargas Llosa has ever put the word “hero.” (His first novel may have reached English-language readers as “The Time of the Hero,” but in Spanish it was “La Ciudad y Los Perros”—“The City and the Dogs.”) A “discreet hero”—in this novel, the ordinary businessman resisting illegality—borders on being a literary contradiction, someone insufficiently larger than life, but such a figure is the essential component of a modest, meliorist dream, one Vargas Llosa has sustained in times even darker than the present by noting that “a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”
No comments:
Post a Comment