Redeemers (51 page)

Nevertheless, the incident initiated (or furthered) a distancing from the Revolution. The year 1968 brought two much more serious problems. In that year of widespread dissidence in both the communist and capitalist worlds, Cuban intellectuals were beginning to be hounded by the government. And the Russians reacted to the Prague Spring of rebellion within Czechoslovakia by pouring troops across the border in an August invasion. Fidel Castro, in a speech, justified the Russian onslaught. Vargas Llosa wrote a critical piece titled “The Socialism of the Tanks” and gave an interview in which he criticized Fidel's support for the Soviet intervention. In October of that year, a number of distinguished (and almost all, until then, pro-Castro) Latin American and Spanish writers including Vargas Llosa put their names to a letter “on the problems of intellectuals in Cuba.” In November, García Márquez, then Mario's close friend, wrote him to say that the letter was in Fidel's hands:

 

Nevertheless, I don't believe it will do any good. Fidel will answer, with the greatest delicacy he can muster, that what he does with his writers and artists is his own business and therefore we can go to hell. I know from a good source that he is not pleased with our attitude on Czechoslovakia and now he has a good opportunity to let off steam.

 

A long process followed that would lead to Mario's estrangement from the Cuban Revolution (and eventually from any form of socialism). Vargas Llosa did not attend a meeting of the Board of Contributors to Casa de las Américas in 1969, essentially because of a schedule conflict. In Cuba his nonattendance was interpreted as a deliberate distancing from the Revolution. He was sent a letter signed by the entire board asking him to come immediately to Cuba to discuss “your attitudes and opinions.” Instead Vargas Llosa wrote to the magazine's editor in chief, Roberto Fernández Retamar:

 

My adherence to Cuba is very deep but it is not nor will it be that of someone who unconditionally accepts, in an automatic way, all the positions adopted on every issue by the revolutionary power. That kind of adherence, which seems to me deplorable even for a bureaucrat, is inconceivable in a writer since, as you know, a writer who stops thinking independently, or dissenting or loudly stating his opinions, is not a writer but a ventriloquist's dummy. With the enormous respect I feel for Fidel and for what he represents, I continue to deplore his support for the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, because I believe that intervention did not suppress a counter-revolution but a movement for democratization within socialism in a country that was aspiring to make of itself something resembling what Cuba, precisely, has made of itself.

 

But he did not go to Cuba to discuss his “attitudes and opinions” and when, in 1971, Heberto Padilla was arrested (along with other intellectuals) and a falsified or extorted “confession” was circulated, Vargas Llosa resigned from the board of Casa de las Américas with a letter to Santamaría:

 

Using methods that are repugnant to the dignity of human beings to force certain comrades to accuse themselves of imaginary betrayals and to sign letters where even the syntax sounds like a product of the police is the negation of what made me, from the first day, embrace the cause of the Cuban Revolution: its decision to fight for justice without losing respect for individuals.

 

Though he continued to issue statements in favor of socialism and insisted that his disenchantment was directed toward specific actions, the Cuban government and its devotees abroad saw only betrayal. He composed and published a letter to Castro, signed by a star-studded international gallery of intellectuals, including Sartre, in which Vargas Llosa expressed their “duty to communicate . . . our shame and our anger” over the case of Padilla. The letter was a turning point, an end to the season of love between intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution. For Vargas Llosa, it precipitated a torrent of antagonism and verbal abuse:

 

From having been a very popular figure among leftists and rebels, I turned into a leper. The same people who used to applaud me with so much enthusiasm when I gave a lecture would insult me . . . and hurl fliers at me.

 

IV

Beginning in 1966, Vargas Llosa would live in Peru and London (though he would later give lectures or teach for a time in English or foreign universities). His sons Álvaro and Gonzalo were born in 1966 and 1967, his daughter Morgana in 1974. A scholarship permitted him to take a doctorate at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid for a thesis on García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. When the thesis was published, the Spanish literary critic Ángel Rama wrote a harsh review, which drifted off into an attack on Vargas Llosa for his “romantic and individualist” reading of the novel, contrary to “the idea of art as human and social work, which Marxism contributes,” while in Latin America, the intelligentsia of the left had begun to turn their backs on him, as a result of his own turning away from the Cuban Revolution. (For months Carlos Rincón, in the journal
Casa de las Américas
, had been severely criticizing his theoretical ideas.)

Disenchanted with politics, he completely immersed himself for a time in the universe where he was strongest, most accurate, most completely at ease—literary creation. His fourth novel,
Pantaleón y las visitadoras
(Pantaleon and the Lady Visitors, the title loosely translated into English as
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service
), is a picaresque treatment of prostitution tolerated (and organized) by the Peruvian army for soldiers serving in the jungle. In 1976 he was chosen to be president of the writers' advocacy group International PEN and the following year he would publish
Aunt Julia and the Writer
. (Years later, in 1983, Julia Urquidi herself, now the abandoned woman, would write her personal account of the long-ago passion,
Lo que Varguitas no dijo
[What Little Vargas (his nickname at the time) Didn't Say], which both praised and dispraised Vargas Llosa. It was for once a criticism and evaluation of him that had nothing to do with politics but was reputed to have angered him. In it she claimed that her urgings and sacrifices had made him into a writer.)

In his theoretical essays of the 1970s he would devaluate the Sartre he had so admired, for the very real limitations of Sartre's literary skill but also in reaction to the Sartrean interpretation of “commitment,” which he had begun to distrust and assign to the ambit of Marxism and socialism from which he was moving further away. Albert Camus surged in his estimation, for his independence from mechanical Marxism, his hatred of authoritarianism, and his praise for individual liberty. As for his father, Ernesto, after the last twist of his cruelty had failed to dissolve the elopement with Aunt Julia, the physical and psychological aggressions against his son had ended decades ago. Nevertheless, “even though I always tried to be polite with him, I never showed more affection than I felt (which was none). The terrible rancor, the fiery hatred I felt toward him as a child, was vanishing with the years.” They last met in January 1979, by chance, in Lima and Mario accompanied the old man to his home where, while eating lunch, Ernesto collapsed. He died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital.

 

BY THEN
Vargas Llosa had discovered liberalism. But his movement away from the left (and the expansion of his creative interests into broader and more universal themes) became definitive after the death of his father. A kind of personal liberation, exclusive of its specific content, seems to have dawned for him with the death of Ernesto Vargas and a closure came, at least in part, on the abuse he had suffered and that had formed (and would continue to form) an inextricable element of his inner being. In politics, he would experience something similar to a conversion.

A few months after Ernesto's death, Vargas Llosa attended an international conference organized by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, where he heard Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Jean-François Revel (whose book
The Totalitarian Temptation
particularly impressed him), and other advocates of economic liberalism, with its emphasis on the open market, small government, and the elimination of virtually all controls on business and finance. By then he had read the philosophical and historical essays of Isaiah Berlin, including (in Berlin's
Against the Current
) essays on socialists like Alexander Herzen who had been influenced by classic liberal ideas. In time he would read Karl Popper and his arguments for classical liberalism, especially
The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Octavio Paz's approach to liberal and democratic positions also had its impact upon him: Vargas Llosa had written for the magazine
Plural
and became an even more frequent contributor to
Vuelta
. But in contrast to Paz, Vargas Llosa's criticism of socialism was not only aesthetic, ideological, and political but also economic. His adoption of the tenets of economic liberalism would be relentless. In time, it would lead him to support some of its highly questionable proponents in the United States and garner continuous criticism from adversaries in Latin America. At the time, as a mark of his new outlook, Vargas Llosa published an enthusiastic text centering on the ideas of De Soto, in which he advocated making squatter-occupied public land the private property of the migrants who had raised their temporary dwellings there; and, against conventional opinion, he defended street vendors, the “informal market,” terming them microbusinesses and a dynamic force within the Peruvian economy.

Galvanized by his political and economic conversion, he would publish, in 1981, a long, magnificent novel,
La guerra del fin del mundo
(The War at the End of the World) about an episode in nineteenth-century Brazil that foreshadowed some of the manifestations of modern fundamentalism. With the flow of an epic, the book deals with the same events made famous by the Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha in his
Os Sertões
(Rebellion in the Backlands), a historical-sociological account of the war waged to resist the new Brazilian republic by a millenarian cult (drawn mostly from the poorest of the poor) in the nineteenth-century backlands (the
sertão
) of northern Brazil. This rebellion took its place in a string of similar Latin American events, before and after, a constant historical blockage within ancient, backward, and oppressive societies: the ferociously violent reaction of the masses—usually led by a charismatic savior who revives or manipulates atavistic myths—against a sudden attempt at modernization. In Peru, in 1780, the rebellion of the mestizo Túpac Amaru II against the Bourbon reforms was such an event. So to a certain extent was the initial Mexican revolt, under the leadership of Father Hidalgo in 1810, against the Spaniards, and, even more clearly, Emiliano Zapata's peasant revolution within the Mexican Revolution. In the remote, desperately impoverished, largely illiterate
sertão
, between 1893 and 1897, a messianic preacher claiming divine inspiration (and divinity itself in his status as a prophet), Antônio Conselheiro drew the loyalty and blind faith of many thousands of the dirt poor (including large numbers of recently freed Afro-Brazilian slaves) and led them to a remote area of Bahia where he offered them a safe haven, a collective colony of their own called Canudos, a rudimentary paradise where they could live and feed themselves and be safe from the “enemies” of religion. But the newborn republic (with the approval of the Church, for whom Conselheiro was a dangerous heretic) launched a series of campaigns against the separatist settlement. Antonio urged his followers to defend “the truth of Jesus” against the “demon” incarnated in the Brazilian Republic. The final war was to the death, with no quarter given or expected from either side. The mobile guerrilla-like forces of the Conselheiro overwhelmed a series of small government forces until a large army, equipped with heavy artillery, finally broke through defenses and massacred all the men (male prisoners had their throats cut) and delivered the young women, after raping many of them, to brothels.

The novel certainly reflects the sea change in Vargas Llosa's political opinions. Fanaticism and factional rigidity (here religious and atavistic) lead their adherents to utter disaster. But equally important is the fascinating mosaic of multiple characters and intense action on both sides of the war, which the author's genius enables him to depict from an almost Olympian vantage point as the tragedy unfolds, step by step, before his creative mind, not only the major themes and the carefully developed moral judgments but the power of brilliantly fashioned details that linger in the mind of the reader. There is, for instance, the moment in
The War at the End of the World
, involving the “Lion of Natuba,” a grievously deformed and crippled young man who moves like an animal on all four limbs. A former human castaway in his native village who has found a place of respect in Canudos and with the power to read and write somehow acquired (by an utterly ignorant but obviously intelligent mind) has become the Boswell to Antonio Conselheiro, copying down his every word. When Canudos is overwhelmed by the troops of the republic, rather than wait to have his throat cut, he rises up on his “rear extremities,” takes the dead body of a child who has been shot from its weakened mother who has begged him to throw the body into a flaming hut, and saying, “This fire has been awaiting me for twenty years,” scurries, singing a psalm, toward the flames that will absorb him.

 

V

The 1980s in Peru opened with an uncommon burst of hope. After twelve years of de facto rule, the military stepped down and called new elections, which returned to power the same president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, they had unceremoniously deposed in 1968. At the time few recognized the dark symbolism of another new, and utterly different, development: the emergence of a Marxist guerrilla organization known as the “Shining Path” (
Sendero Luminoso
). Its first public manifestation—the curious practice of hanging dogs from lampposts with signs attached bearing the name of Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the “running dog” whom the Sendero accused of betraying Mao Tse-tung—aroused repugnance rather than fear. But the rapid plunge into fiercer activity very quickly demonstrated that this was a guerrilla group to be taken with the utmost seriousness.