The rest of the warrior could be titled the portrait of Mario Vargas Llosa that his daughter Morgana, who is the photographer of the family, made to the author of The city and the dogs when he was on the coast of northern Peru looking for material for his next novel, already finished, still without definitive title.
In the photograph he is a man of his age (he turned 87 on March 28), looking at the side of the beach, dressed in white, as if assailed by a doubt or an idea, leaning on the cane he now uses, sometimes out of coquetry or perhaps because he needs it to walk on his walks. that they were already habitual from their most distant youth.
He looks melancholic, or at least thoughtful, to the Nobel Prize for Literature in that photograph that Morgana took of him in September 2022, when even for his personal life the changes – sentimental, of location – that gave so much to talk about before the European spring had not occurred.
Abandoned that relationship he had with Isabel Preysler for eight years, returned to his home in the center of Madrid, away by his own will from the dictates of a press that turned yellow to talk about what is not his literature but his private life, Vargas Llosa made trips like the one that took him to Peru in search of novelesque elements.
Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Preysler during a trip to Washington, when everything was fine between them.
There he also met his children, his second wife, Patricia Llosa, his house overlooking the coast of Lima, and ultimately a world that also summarizes his important library.
He happily attended the wedding of a granddaughter, danced and there were testimonies that explained that he is in good shape.
And he went to many places that suited him for this book that will soon be part of his extensive bibliography. He also visited Paris to receive a very special award: since the end of February he has been a member of the Académie française, a distinction that for the first time goes to a non-French language writer.
Vargas Llosa in Paris, where he was accepted into the French Academy. Photo: Reuters.
There were all his closest relatives, Patricia, children, friends, while in Madrid the media storm that followed that rupture that has already been forgotten even the press that put it on its feet subsided.
Shortly after, the Cervantes Institute directed by the poet Luis García Montero, his friend, and his friend the Nicaraguan, exiled in Spain, Sergio Ramírez, proposed to celebrate at the headquarters of the aforementioned entity the release to the bookstores of an unusual book, El fuego de la imaginación (Alfaguara), a compilation made by Carlos Granés of a large number of his texts on colleagues from different eras. but contemporaries above all, to whom he has devoted his attention for nearly seventy years. A thousand pages of intense attention.
Vargas Llosa said yes, he interrupted his travels through those worlds and his new novel, so he came to Madrid to listen, before that compilation achieved by one of his best readers, the Colombian Granés, to those who praised the figure of the author who most dealt with the alien among those who starred in the most abundant harvest of literature in Spanish: The boom.
After those days (he attended the first, then went with his son Álvaro to look for territories that he wanted to exploreto escape the noise that still haunted him at the entrance of his house in Madrid), we proposed to consult him on issues that could be of public interest.
He was still immersed in his novel, he had no time for interviews, and in those trips of prospecting lives that interest him (that of Gustave Flaubert, for example), he found a space to answer what we wanted to know about the current moment of his convictions and the life he has in his past as a writer and in his future as a
citizen.
Here, his considerations, sometimes mix of admiration, disappointment or melancholy, sometimes like the look that is glimpsed in that photograph, by the sea, portrayed by his daughter on a beach in Peru.
-You have just starred in Spain a rabidly literary comeback. He came from France, where he received the homage of the French Academy. He went to Peru, where his roots and his literary and human passions are, and there he finished a new novel. With what spirit does he receive all this swing of affections and life?
I will be alive and keep reading and writing until death comes or I become a complete idiot. I leave the choice to my children.
-In this Spanish return, writers from America and Spain have spoken with enormous admiration towards you, among other things for having been so generous with them. Where does your willingness to write about others, consecrated or unconsecrated, come from?
-I think that criticism is one of the weapons with which literature can put an end to fetishes and leave room for those who are making their way. My contributions have been, almost always, reasons for reading. I believe that the essay is one of the richest forms of literature and that it should not be justified at all. Who has written essays like those of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges! They, and not only they, have raised the genre to the level of the novel and poetry.
Vargas Llosa does not think about retirement and reaffirms it with the preparation of his new novel.
One of those who referred to you in that tribute at the Cervantes Institute is Sergio Ramírez, who is now, in Spain, an exile from Nicaragua. This is a reality in Latin America. What continues to happen in that territory that there is no way to abandon the custom of dictatorships?
The case of Sergio Ramirez is dramatic. He and his wife live the injustices that are the greatest test of Latin American life. It seems incredible that Sergio and Tulita live in exile and have to, almost 80 years old, go through that disdainful situation. At least, they have received multiple tributes, very deserved by the way, and truth be told: Latin America is full of exiles and concealments.
You yourself suffered dictatorships, from a very young age, until, in maturity, a president and his henchman decided to persecute you and even deprived you of the fact of being Peruvian. And they did not let you visit the Leoncio Prado, the cradle of The city and the dogs ... What have these aggressions meant for yourself?
Dictatorships have been the plague of Latin America. They prevented Bolivar's dream, the union of all Latin American countries, from becoming a reality. And they have contributed, better than anyone, to disinformation, and have been the biggest obstacle for alliances to prevail on the continent.
"Latin America beats differently," he said at the tribute ceremony in Madrid. Populism, he said, is the matter that makes it a territory in which freedom cannot be distinguished. What is this demand for freedom for you today? Who can guarantee or defend it?
Literature must denounce what is wrong and seek fraternity above all else. The struggle, in this sense, is manifold. We must defend freedom for all voices and doctrines. Because without freedom, as we know, barbarism will always prevail.
And, in this state of affairs, what can literature do to denounce or to impose ideas against barbarism?
Latin American literature should be controversial. Respectful but controversial, since there are many options at stake. There are Marxists who would like a slave regime and a single doctrine, which we must fight with energy and education, things that are not incompatible. And tolerance must be defended, which is inseparable from the democratic solution.
-Many years traveling from one place to another, does that relationship with the world dilute the first passion, the countries of which you wrote, the stories you told? And the ones he counts now still have the root of that Zabalita?
Peru is going from bad to worse, and now it is isolated for having defended freedom, in which its neighbors do not believe. It is a great pleasure to see that in Latin America Peru is one of the exceptions for refusing to follow the example of the dictatorships that now surround us... Young Peruvians inspire me with an infinite pity, especially those who have a literary vocation. How difficult a gamble it is to write novels that are not disputed by publishers and that must finance themselves. That's why there are so many storytellers in Peru and very few novelists. The only way to make a difference is to read more and more and write, and to denounce what is wrong and to defend the right to have an opinion, whoever the voice is that sincerely speaks its mind.
-When you start writing, when you approach a novel, or even an article, do you still feel vertigo, or is writing already docile with you, do you do what you want?
When I start a novel or an essay, the experience doesn't do me any good. I've been writing for many years and none of that gives me greater security. The fears and insecurities are the same. And also, of course, illusions.
-The fire of imagination has to do with the work of great colleagues of his. Of those discoveries, which was the one that moved you the most; The one who, being like you and of your time, was going to better explain the literature that interested you?
-One of the books that most surprised and seduced me was One Hundred Years of Solitude. I think it's an outstanding book, which any literature should be proud of.
-This book has also been described as an explanation of what would be in his case "an awareness of literature". If that phrase serves to explain the enormous number of pages you have devoted to the literatures of others, what would be for you what literature is as the consciousness of an era or a people?
I sincerely believe that literature is the guarantee of democracy. Freedom is in books, in everyone, even in those who speak against freedom. What gives a country a choice in favor of it are books. For example, in France. I just spent two weeks there and I was touched that there are so many bookstores and so many readers. France remains an example in that regard, and in many others.
-In your speeches you have emphasized some proper names of dissimilar identities, such as Borges and Sartre. I read Borges at night, Sartre during the day. You were a communist and Borges was not well regarded among communists. But you were sympathetic to Sartre. Is there a literary passion that you later disowned? That is, have your writers remained yours?
I secretly read Borges and now I read it in full light, without any shame. And it is also the case of Sartre, from whom I have just bought two little books on the way we feel images. There is no shame in reading everything within our reach because that is true freedom.
He changed his mount, he went from believing in the Cuban Revolution to looking for a different light in liberals. What significance did this change of direction and ideas have in your own literature?
The Cuban Revolution is a dictatorship. And the Cubans who are still there go through real calamities and hardships. Do you want better proof of what socialism leads to? At the moment, the only openly imperialist country is Russia, with its ignoble attacks on Ukraine. It is curious: the only attempt at appropriation in the world has Russia as its main protagonist.
-He is now the greatest of the boom, the survivor, the one who is still there, and so camping. He remains, as his editor Pilar Reyes told you, "an immense reader." Is this, the immense reader of The Fire of Imagination, what has actually kept you as the storyteller you are?
As a writer I have been very lucky. This has not been the case in Latin America, unfortunately. When I was young there were many illusions about our continent. Now, looking at the panorama, it's hard not to be pessimistic. Everything is worse and it would be foolish to blind oneself about it. It is true that there are hopes, but every day they seem more distant.
-Critical passion is a value that your anthologist, Carlos Granés, highlights over the whole of the work of others. Under this category, criticism, have fallen in your case almost all literatures, European, American, the whole world ... What literature prevails for you among all those that made you?
Carlos Granés is an admirable critic and everything he has done for Latin American literature is proof of this. Not only has he united these multiple genres, but he has demonstrated the futility of the borders that separate us and in which he has seen, rather, a reflection and an alliance. And he has used literature as the best example.
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