“To be able to write novels I have always needed to have a foot today,” Mario Vargas Llosa told us in his last interview with El País the same day he published his last column in the newspaper. He reached these pages on December 2, 1990 and said goodbye to his readers on December 17, 2023. From the beginning, his tribune was titled Touchstone “Because it was the stone that served to measure the purity and value of metals” and it seemed like a perfect metaphor to “measure, that is, find, the truth in the world that surrounds us.”
In that effort he spent 33 years writing regularly in the newspaper, debating with himself and with the world on all contemporary matters, until composing a journalistic work at the exact height of the immense novelist he was. Throughout this time we have been seeing it to affirm, doubt or change; Comment with curiosity intact the events of today “submitting to the screening of reason and collating it with my convictions, doubts and confusion”; It is offered as an example of the man and the intellectual who takes care of the complexity of the world and is not afraid of dogmas or the controversy that caused his ideological evolution.
It is always better to read Vargas than to read about Vargas because, in addition, it has been a transparent columnist that has been thrown with passion and its own and free criteria over all the puddles that humanity has stepped on in their time of life. With a long and deep look, far from the meanness that great figures can also incubate. His last article published here was a declaration of love of journalism that serves society, seeking the truthful facts and respect for El País for distinguishing the facts from opinions and hosting discrepant positions with its editorial line. To the privilege of having enjoyed his Sunday prose for so long, he added the generous and elegant farewell that sealed three decades of mutual commitment.
In the articles, in the brief epistolary exchanges that we have maintained in these four years, in the face -to -face conversation, or in a public act of a long time ago and that I especially remember because none of the notable Spanish liberals summoned to that event that I had to moderate could continue, or far, to the Nobel Llosa
As for so many Spaniards of my generation, the boom Latin American came to my life with One hundred years of loneliness, As soon as the summer of my 14 years. It happened in a house in the countryside where, when the school ended, we ended all the children of the family. For a few days there was no pool, no bicycle, or games with my cousins, or nothing more than that madness of the book, that glare that was like a flash that binds to you and frees you. I have counted many times that the pleasure of summer was forever associated in my life to the gloom of a room without more light than a slightly open window to be able to read, but necessarily intrigued to protect myself from the heat of the south.
García Márquez opened the door and the rest entered her, first The city and dogs, And behind all the others and all Vargas Llosa, including another summer, many years later, walled in another room in gloom with The goat party in the hands, without stepping on the beach for days, with the same teenage fury. A sustained literary glare is like a crush in its first phase, an impermeable passion to routine, discrepancies, over time and absence.