Salman Rushdie

I knew Salman Rushdie before he was famous, in 1980s England.

We had a good Spanish wine at his house and then we went to a soccer game, probably to applaud the team in my neighborhood that I was a fan of at the time.

I didn't know much about Salman Rushdie, except that he had graduated from Cambridge and that he had published several novels, including

about the independence of India, which dazzled me and which, it seems to me, is the best novel he wrote at the time.

In that first interview, he talked to me a lot about the Latin American novel, which he knew from the English translations made by American publishers in America.

Later, he was in Central America and I read, in his book

that he attacked me with the arguments with which the extreme left in Latin America usually attacks me, so I refrained from reading it for several years until his

the year 1988, the same year that I read it, and that I did not like it so much, especially because of the numerous topics it dealt with and in a way that seemed quite superficial to me.

Among his novels, it is still one of my favorites

a superb book that, to my little understanding, has not yet surpassed.

When the

scandal in which he was sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini, I wrote an article defending him and saying that I was in solidarity with the defense of freedom that, in my opinion, should be carried out by any intellectual worthy of the name , instead of all those writers, stimulated by solidarity with the fanatics of Islamism, who used any pretext to attack their supposed adversaries, including myself.

Months or years later, I received a call from him, in which he reproached me for talking about him in a report and criticizing his closeness to Cuba and the Sandinismo in Nicaragua, which, it seemed to me, was in some way against his version of a policy of defense of freedom, with which he fully agreed.

In those days, I learned of the thousand hideous things that Salman Rushdie had suffered since the British authorities had taken up his defense.

Things had not been at all as people imagined.

For now, he had to pay out of his pocket to the police commandos in charge of taking care of him, which he did every night, looking for a place to sleep, generally a barracks or a police station, out of the reach of the terrorists who, according to orders from Ayatollah Khomeini They wanted to kill him.

It was around then that we brought him to Spain, with the director of EL PAÍS, who was then Joaquín Estefanía.

At the event, which took place I think in Alcalá de Henares, Salman Rushdie explained his situation and said, among other things, that Ayatollah Khomeini's conviction was a frontal attack on freedom.

Two or three times we met in New York, at public events, where we never discussed our different ways of embodying the theme of freedom, despite his case that kept him persecuted by a whole world of fanatics who tried to kill him for the condemnation of a saint.

Something that was never fully clarified was the agreement between Great Britain and Ayatollah Khomeini, or his heir, according to which Iran ceased its persecution of Salman Rushdie and allowed him to live in New York, free from stalking.

What happened a few days ago, at the literary festival in Chautauqua, a small New York town, ruins such an agreement, if there was one, above all, seeing how the Iranian press has celebrated the author of this assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie, where the major newspapers regard him as little less than a hero and shower this would-be murderer with the most abject praise.

Iranian government spokesman Nasser Kanani stated that "in this attack only Salman Rushdie and his supporters deserve to be blamed and even condemned."

Kanani stressed that "by insulting the sacred issues of Islam and crossing the red lines of more than 1.5 billion Muslims, Rushdie exposed himself to the wrath and rage of the people."

Rushdie's situation is very serious, according to his literary agent, Andrew Wylie.

He is in a nearby hospital and could lose an eye as a result of the attack by Hadi Matar, who is 24 years old, that is, he was not even born when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his order to assassinate his thousands of followers.

There is a real fanaticism to be filled with hatred against a writer based on the condemnation of a holy man about a book that has not even been read, and that he will probably read in the prison that he now occupies, and that, without a doubt, he will occupy for many years. years, if the judges fulfill their function and sentence him for the time of his criminal attempt.

Hadi Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, is charged with the attempted murder by County Attorney Jason Schmidt.

Her victim is seriously injured, according to his literary agent, and "will probably lose an eye," he explained.

"The nerves in her arm were severed and her liver was damaged from the stab wounds."

He is now, after an assisted respiration, in a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where surgeons worked several hours to save him from death.

Rushdie was attacked before his intervention began at the Chautauqua festival, which, ironically, was dedicated to protecting persecuted writers.

Yesterday, while I was writing this article, Salman Rushdie began to speak, uttering, already awake, his first words.

Apparently, he defended himself with great courage from his victimizer and managed to prevent him from murdering him (the attacker jumped on him and he defended himself as best he could, managing, with this action, to limit the blows of his murderer and avoid being killed in the moment).

After the attack, he was taken to the hospital by helicopter, where he is still, which is from the same region where this festival is celebrated.

Perhaps the worst thing about this story is the enthusiasm of the Iranian press about this assassination attempt, and the praise they give to its killer that puts us all to shame.

They treat him as a hero and celebrate his cowardice, as has been done by the entire press fanaticized by the hatred he sowed, nearly 30 years ago, by Ayatollah Khomeini who, as is known, had not even read the book he condemned.

He did it only by hearsay, to win heaven through that crime.

It only remains for me to wish that the doctors save Salman Rusdhie and that they return him to life and to books, because that is what he has been, a writer, and like all writers, he has always been dedicated to his passion, although the Circumstances made him a "cursed writer", something that was far from being when I met him, in that London of the eighties where the rain fell mercilessly on the English and their companions, that is, we writers who had our own problems, and that we believed, were the antipodes of the fanatics.

We, then, felt remote and hardly knew about these fanatics, a rare species of which our time is particularly generous.

© Mario Vargas Llosa, 2022. Press rights in Spanish in Spain and Latin America reserved for Ediciones EL PAÍS, SL, 2022. Press rights in Spanish for other territories and for other languages, reserved for Mario Vargas Llosa c/ o Carmen Balcells Literary Agency, SA.

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