On the last page of I Dedicate My Silence to You, after the end of the novel, Mario Vargas Llosa writes two surprising paragraphs. They take the place of those author's notes, more or less conventional, where two or three details are given about the writing of the book we have just read, and this is how Vargas Llosa tells us that he finished the draft of this novel in Madrid, on April 27, 2022, and that he spent the following months correcting it. But then, suddenly, from one line to the other, the harmless note takes on the tone and language of a diary: Vargas Llosa announces a trip to northern Peru; then he says that he has already done it, and that it has served him well; then he writes, "I think I've finished this novel now." His intention now is to finish an essay on Sartre, he says at once, and closes the paragraph – and the book – with these words: "It will be the last thing I will write."
I didn't think that simple page would move me the way it has, even though I read it with full awareness of what Vargas Llosa's work has meant for my experience as a Latin American and my vocation as a novelist. For with that farewell not only closes one of the richest, most encompassing and most ambitious literary enterprises of our time, but also the work of an entire generation that transformed two things forever: Spanish-language literature and the place of Latin America in the world's imagination. Vargas Llosa is the last of a lineage, the only survivor of that handful of writers that we have grouped under the crude label of the Latin American boom, whose books have taken the place of a true education for many of us: literary, of course, but also sentimental and political. The great novels of the boom wanted to rewrite Latin American history; What they also managed to do was to give some of us the tools to invent our biography.
That's right. I can say—and here I come to the first person—that my civil life is incomprehensible without the books of these writers, from their fiction to their essays and from their journalism to their poetry. My relationship with them began with reading The Colonel Has No One to Write to Him, which I did at the age of 11 as a school assignment, and over the course of the following four decades I have been a constant presence: these books have sometimes been a model and a spur, and sometimes an uncomfortable authority against which there is only room for rebellion. But they've always been there, as a sort of portable country. A considerable part of my life as a reader and novelist takes place in other languages and other traditions, but that precise moment in twentieth-century Latin American literature, the one that begins with Borges and ends with Vargas Llosa, is a home for me, at least in the sense of that verse by T.S. Eliot: the place from which we depart.
So the authors of the Latin American boom, as well as those who were swept up in that phenomenon, have a place of enormous importance in my library—the physical and the emotional, which do not always coincide. But this is a banal observation; It is more interesting to note that it is a contradictory place, since these names are at the same time classic and contemporary, founders of my tradition and presences in my world. Around the time of Cortázar's and Borges' deaths, I was just beginning to read seriously, but since I began to publish books I have lived in a world where the new works of those who have made my tradition were also published, and with some regularity: Cabrera Infante, Fuentes, García Márquez. Which is more or less as if Flaubert continued to publish every three years without changing the circumstance that he wrote Madame Bovary. Mario Vargas Llosa, of course, is the last of these novelists, but he is also the one who most clearly marked my way of understanding the profession from the beginning.
I don't know how many pages I've written about his novels, but the ones I prefer are as much a part of my memories as my own experiences. The theft of the exam and the final meeting between the Jaguar and Lieutenant Gamboa, Jum's body hanging from a tree in Santa María de Nieva, the conversation in the offices of Cayo Mierda, the Baron of Cañabrava doing something unforgivable when he is surprised by his wife, who has gone mad: these scenes still live in my memory as if I had seen them. But I have often said that, beyond the art of making novels, Vargas Llosa represented for me a way of assuming the literary vocation that I can only call liberating. In my twenties, I was a law student who had just discovered an uncomfortable truth: all I was interested in was reading novels and trying to write them. In my disorientation of those days, as I read as if my life depended on it, I desperately clung to other words that didn't exist in the novels, and I can't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't discovered them in time.
Those words are inLiterature is Fire, a discourse from the 60s where the literary craft is a "daily and furious immolation." They are in The Perpetual, where Flaubert serves Vargas Llosa to defend the virtues of the almost monastic dedication to a profession that demands everything. They are, with a more confessional tone, in the autobiographical pages of The Fish in the Water: "I would only be a writer if I dedicated myself to writing morning, noon and night." I don't know how many times in my years of uncertainty — which are the most important, which never really end — an interview that Vargas Llosa gave in the 70s to the Colombian writer Ricardo Cano Gaviria. "The authentic writer puts absolutely everything at the service of his vocation," says Vargas Llosa. "Anything that goes against the interests of literature is suppressed, discarded."
Now the years have passed, and I can no longer say for sure which came first for me: the discovery of my vocation or that of a writer who embodied it emphatically and explained it eloquently. For a young man who was beginning to write in a fastidious world like Colombia in the early 90s, facing the resistance of social mechanisms whose explanation does not fit into these lines, dealing with the uncertain future and the possibility of failure, those pages were invaluable aids. Literature not as a profession, nor as a more or less dignified way of earning a living, much less as a means to other things (the frivolity of success, the misunderstandings of prestige); literature as a way of being in the world that is devouring, exclusive and exclusive, and discipline, even at the cost of sacrifice, as the only possible form of its exercise. Many novelists are more present than Vargas Llosa in my novels, but it is likely that none is more so in my understanding of what I do every day. You will understand why his parting made such a deep impression on me, and perhaps you will pardon these too frank and somewhat melancholy lines: but the risk of impudence seemed to me preferable to that of ingratitude.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a writer.
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