Mario Vargas Llosa has died. A few days ago, thinking about him, I remembered a poem of gratitude that is sung in Jewish Easter. It is titled “Dayenu”, It would be enough for us. It dates from the ninth century and is a concatenation of expressions of gratitude for the successive wonders that the people of Israel received in their exodus towards the promised land. Extracted from its religious context, song sounds more natural and permanent. He can express, for example, the cumulative gratitude of children to parents, from disciples to teachers. With him I want to express my gratitude as a reader, intellectual, liberal and friend.
If Vargas Llosa had only given us his fiction work, it would be enough. How many adventures and stories have made us live their novels, stories, theater pieces. How much to thank the subtle construction of their plots, its unforgettable characters, its classical but also daring, innovative architecture, its prose nothing baroque: precise, delicious and transparent. I remember now Mayta’s storySupreme Radiography of guerrilla fanaticism in Latin America: a crooked radicalized Catholic religiosity towards Marxism and in love with its self -proclaimed virtue filled the region with death and then turned back without true consciousness or memory of its responsibility in the tragedy. EITHER THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLDthat great Tolstian epic, that canvas worthy of Brueghel or the Bosco: brutal murderers, legend bandits, cangaceiros Implacable, sinful priests, circus dwarves, prostitutes, blessed and blessed, converts merchants. Canvas of misery, but also of redemption. And how to forget The goat partyamazing and definitive portrait of the Latin American dictator that also is from society and the environment that claims and applauds it, and that finally, in a cry of freedom, sometimes, exorcises it.
Nothing more remote to Vargas Llosa than the fascination of power (so characteristic in our culture and our literature). But the remarkable thing has been his ability to channel his repulsion towards punctual, surgical recreation of evil. Literature becomes the best revenge. However, it is necessary to dream of a better world, and that was the reason for Paradise in the other cornerthe portrait of Flora Tristán, so linked to Peruvian history, to the history of art and the history of an idea that obsess Vargas Llosa as obsessed with mankind from the Enlightenment, and that our time, perhaps, has buried: the idea of utopia. And, in that same genre, it stands out RECIOUS TIMESwhose background is the coup d’etat to the president of Guatemala Jacobo Affenz in 1954. Without that act of misunderstanding and superb of the United States – with characters that prefigure Trump – the communist drift in Latin America is not explained in Latin America, which we continue to pay.
If Vargas Llosa had only given us his novels, but not his non -fiction work, it would be enough for us. But it has also given us extraordinary non -fiction works. Archaic utopiafor example, painful and empathic radiography of Peruvian indigenism. Towards 1993 he published The fish in the water (His autobiography), exorcism of an arduous presidential campaign, brave omen of freedom in the continent. Mario accounts adjustment, the book allowed its readers to look out of tearing and pain, shelters and redemptions of their child and youth life, and understand their passion for literature and freedom.
If Vargas Llosa had only given us his novels and his non -fiction books, but he would not have written reports or articles, it would be enough for us. But it happens that it has also given us a vast and acute work in those genres. In the seventies, he traveled from liberation to freedom, of the French rationalist and revolutionary universe to the English empirical and liberal universe. We were in the anteroom of the eighties, in which the magazine Vuelta of Octavio Paz He faced right -wing dictatorships and leftist revolutions. Mario gave many of his battles in our magazine. In Vuelta He published his heartbreaking Report on the Matanza de Uchuraccay.
If Vargas Llosa would have read his fictional work, his monographs and essays, his articles and reports, but he would not have deployed any direct political effort, obviously it would be enough for us. But it has also deployed that effort. His struggle for the presidency of Peru in 1990 was an omen of an era of freedom that now seems forgotten, but will return. In the 1990 meeting, he buried the PRI with a phrase: “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship.” In 2002 he created the International Foundation for Liberty, which has gathered liberal thinking by offering practical solutions to the problems of the region. Soon at Congress of the FIL in Caracas, Hugo Chávez, in one of his typical bravuces, challenged him to a public debate. Mario, with his usual courage, accepted. At the last minute, Predictably, Chávez reculled.
If my paths and his would never have crossed over half a century of literary and intellectual activity, I would be grateful. But, for my immense fortune, our paths crossed. I just wanted to accompany him in his long and courageous liberal journey.
Sometimes I noticed on his face an expression of sadness before the bleak show of the world. But suddenly, naturally, I saw a smile appear. There was a stoic soldier in Mario’s soul, but a stoic who responded to evil with imagination, irony, humor and intelligence. And with an inexhaustible moral combativeness.
Today April 13 at night is Jewish Easter. Today families sing the Dayenu. Today, once again, I thank you, Mario. We will not give up the promised land of freedom. But while arriving, the promised land is literature, your literature.