Redeemers (53 page)

Mayta—the hero of the novel, and the many models for him in recent history—failed in his one serious attempt at social upheaval. But that failure was by no means inevitable. The Jauja insurrection might well have had a different outcome. “Over the years,” one of the skeptical witnesses tells the novelist, “I've come to realize that he wasn't so crazy . . . If the first action had lasted longer, things might have turned out the way Mayta planned.” Mayta himself, much older and wiser, denies that the rebellion was a suicidal gesture.

The terrain, the possibility of making contact with other centers of provincial rebellion, the role of a determined vanguard—these were elements common to other struggles more successful elsewhere. Mayta's failure was due to accidents and bad timing. “The Cuban Revolution . . . killed that superego that ordered us to accept the dictum that ‘conditions aren't right,' that the revolution was an interminable conspiracy,” a communist leader tells the novelist. “With Fidel's entrance into Havana, the revolution seemed to put itself within reach of anyone who would dare to fight.” Similarly, in the 1960s, “daring to fight” in Bolivia, Che Guevara chose poorly, in terms both of human and physical geography. Ten years after his death, however, revolutionaries who belonged to the same universe as the youthful Mayta would attend more carefully to the details and hope to gain the power that had eluded him.

 

UPON COMPLETING
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
, where he exorcized his demons dating back to the guerrilla wars, Vargas Llosa undertook another exorcism, that of the most profound collective ghost in his own history: the racial hatreds of the “Peruvian archipelago,” ancestral hatreds of unprecedented intensity in Hispanic America, rooted in history, geography, religion, cultural barriers, prejudice, color, and immigration, but sustained throughout the twentieth century by an indigenist ideology that Vargas Llosa—not without cause—rated as passé, reactionary, collectivist, magical, irrational, antimodern, and antiliberal. Such was the weight of this “beautiful lie” (the concept of an indigenous Arcadia) that Vargas Llosa did not want to approach it by writing yet another beautiful lie (a novel) but rather a painful truth. The result was an extraordinarily serious and well-documented book of historical interpretation,
The Archaic Utopia
.

His critique of Peruvian indigenism delves back into its remote colonial origins, then discusses in detail its modern reappearance in the 1920s (in Valcárcel and Mariátegui). But it is centered above all on the life and works of José María Arguedas (1911–69), a noteworthy Peruvian novelist and anthropologist who took indigenism to new literary heights and to the greatest extremes of radical ideology. Sympathetically, without a trace of animosity, Vargas Llosa takes up the tragic life of this man, whom he knew, and whose life was torn apart by the confrontation between the modern world and his love for a mythicized version of ancient Peru.

Vargas Llosa argues that the idyllic Inca Empire depicted by various authors—allegedly fraternal, homogeneous, suffused with a “happy collectivist promiscuity,” and crystallized above all in Arguedas's work—was a romantic idealization. All in all, these “traditions and customs” passed down across time had developed into a reverse racism (against
mestizos
of mixed heritage, blacks, whites, and Chinese), accompanied by isolation, passivity, machismo, regionalism, and brutal underdevelopment. In contrast to the figure of Arguedas, Vargas Llosa offers the ideas of the sociologist Uriel García (who makes a defense of “spiritual miscegenation,” in other words, a Mexican solution for the Peruvian condition) and above all the Marxist criticism of Alberto Flores Galindo (1949–90), who analyzed the “despotic and dominating” character of the Inca Empire and the current developments—in large part transforming the old Peru—of Indian farmers committing themselves to the lure of private property and the market. These trends were already visible at the moment when Arguedas decided to end his life. In the opinion of Vargas Llosa, by 1986 “the Indian of flesh and blood has been emancipated from the Ghetto in which he was traditionally kept by exploitation, discrimination and prejudice—both social and ideological—and he has chosen modernity.” But soon enough, Vargas Llosa would find out for himself that this transition to modernity was much slower than he had imagined, and that these ancestral hatreds remained almost intact.

 

VII

Vargas Llosa would gradually return to active politics, eventually aspiring to the highest level of power, riding the wave of his now firmly democratic convictions and with the strong faith of a convert in the value of the free market. The Aprista Alan García won the presidency of Peru in 1985 (the first time APRA had triumphed), defeating a candidate to the left of him in a run-off election. His presidency (1985–90) was in numerous ways a disaster, marked by hyperinflation, careless spending on mega-projects often left uncompleted, a huge increase in poverty, and the constantly growing violence of the Sendero Luminoso, ineffectually countered by a “dirty war” studded with government atrocities. When García tried to nationalize the banking system, his attempts were frustrated. The drive against nationalization was spearheaded by three parties who, in 1988, formed a coalition called the Frente Democratico (FREDEMO). Vargas Llosa seemed a natural leader for that coalition, opposed to the statist populism of García, to outmoded militarism and to the Marxist guerrillas. One year later, FREDEMO nominated him for president of Peru. With all the vast power of his creative imagination, Mario Vargas Llosa could not have foreseen what was in store for him:

 

. . . each time I have been asked why I was willing to move from my vocation as a writer into politics, I have answered “For a moral reason.” Because the circumstances put me into a situation of leadership at a critical moment for the life of my country . . . [My wife] Patricia does not agree. “Moral obligation was not the decisive thing,” she says. It was the adventure, the hope of living an experience full of excitement and risk. Of writing, in real life, the great novel . . . I don't discount that, in the dark background where so many of our actions are pieced together, it was the temptation of the adventure, before any altruism, that pushed me into the life of politics . . .

 

This honest evaluation of his motives comes from
El pez en el agua
(The Fish in the Water), an elegantly written memoir published in 1993 that ranges across his entire life and includes his perceptions and experiences along the route of his political adventure. After the various failures of the García administration, Peru was clearly in need of strong, innovative government action. Vargas Llosa's proposals were in line with his political philosophy: fiscal austerity (which many feared would negatively affect the country's social programs), a commitment to free trade, and a thorough privatization of government enterprises. It was a program that attracted a significant segment of Peruvian opinion but not the left nor a considerable proportion of the disadvantaged. It was branded, negatively, using the English word, as a
shock
approach to the needs of the country. In the first stage of the election (it was followed by a run-off, since no one gained more than 50 percent of the vote), Vargas Llosa led the field but only with. 27.61 percent of the vote while his closest opponent was a candidate opposed to his sweeping austerity proposals, Alberto Fujimori of the Cambio 90 (Change 90) Party, close behind him with 24.62 percent, followed by a much smaller percentage for other candidates to the left of FREDEMO.

The campaign was a vicious one. His opponents attacked Vargas Llosa for his politics, his personal life, and even read sexually charged passages from his novels over the radio in an attempt to discredit him “morally.” But along with the confrontation between neoliberal economic philosophy and its opponents, along with the personalized mud-slinging of bare-knuckle politics, a curious blend of Peru's endemic, pervasive, and “multicolored” racism also figured into the campaign. Some of Vargas Llosa's supporters contended that Peru had to be governed by a “real Peruvian” (they meant a white
criollo
). Fujimori's partisans (and other parties) seized on the theme of racism and expanded it, in a reverse direction and to their great advantage. Anti-Chinese racism, for instance, is one of the country's strains of that particular psychological disease. Although they called him
chinito
(“little Chinaman,” normally a disparaging term used for all people of Oriental descent), the people knew that Fujimori was the son of Japanese immigrants and that “Japan” meant wealth, power, possibly (in the minds of many uneducated people) a lifeline for Peru that could be established with Japan by a president of kindred ethnic origin. Fujimori argued that he represented not only “chinitos” but “cholitos,” Peruvians of mixed descent. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, was presented as a “white man,” a “Spaniard,” a “rich” member of the dominating race. In the final pages of
The Fish in the Water
, Vargas Llosa describes a profoundly painful experience with this reverse racism. It happened on a morning of intense heat, on his campaign trail, near a small village in the Valley of Chira:

 

An infuriated horde of men and women came out to meet me, armed with sticks and stones and every kind of blunt weapon. Their faces were twisted with hate, they seemed to have come from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were blurred together. Half naked, with very long hair and nails . . . surrounded by skeletal children with swollen bellies, shouting and screaming to encourage themselves, they launched themselves against the caravan as if they were fighting for their lives and wanted to immolate themselves, with a boldness and a savagery that said it all about the almost inconceivable levels of deterioration to which life had descended for millions of Peruvians. What were they defending themselves from? What ghosts stood behind those menacing clubs and knives?

 

There were many ghosts, of course, behind these raging villagers, dating back to the first apparition, the Spanish Conquest. “Spaniards out!” shouted the menacing crowd. And there it was: the heritage, intact, directed against a man blamed for being a member of the “ruling race,” one of whom was now the victim of all that “primitive racial nomenclature that decides a great part of the destinies of individuals” in Peru.

 

VIII

In the second round, Vargas Llosa would be routed by Fujimori, who took 56.5 percent of the vote to Vargas Llosa's 33.9. (Fujimori would eventually implement the austerity measures Vargas Llosa had championed, beginning the economic revival of the country. He would later carry out a coup against a Congress dominated by his opponents, which [unfortunately] would be strongly supported by Peruvian voters in his 1992 reelection. And he would go on to break the back of the Sendero Luminoso—finally capturing its maximum leader, Abimael Guzmán—and engineer yet a third term in office, but would then fall into abject disgrace, charged with encouraging massive corruption and a slew of human rights abuses in the anti-guerrilla campaign. Finally, he would be sentenced to jail for a long prison term.)

For Vargas Llosa, the great political adventure was over. He would continue emphatically affirming his political opinions but his road from now on would be the continuing process of creation and, as an integral part of it, his encounters with the past. In
The Fish in the Water
, he would finally offer a direct portrait of his own vicious personal dictator and family terrorist, his father Ernesto Vargas. He had already treated him indirectly in his novels, where the rebellion against the authority of the father is a constantly recurrent theme. But now he faced Ernesto head-on, and in the slowly unfolding details of the narrative, he would relive the “terrible rancor” aroused in his confrontation with an arbitrary, absolute, unpredictable, and brutal power.

In literature and in life, Vargas Llosa had faced all the fanaticisms of identity: of race, religion, and class. What demon remained to be exorcized? The principal cause of so much of Latin American misery, the “cruel father” of an entire country, the archetypical dictator, the despot who, in different ways, has often reduced the history of those countries to a mere biography of power. It would be the culmination of Vargas Llosa's creative process of parricide.

Dictatorship has been a central theme not only of Latin American history but of its literature. Almost all the novelists of the “Latin American Boom” had written a novel about or based upon their own local dictator. Vargas Llosa, since 1975, had been interested in treating the figure of Rafael Trujillo, absolute master of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Now that he had personally experienced his own political travails and accumulated new perceptions of the variegated evils of tyrannous men and tyrannous thoughts, he felt himself prepared to enter the hallucinatory realm of
The Feast of the Goat
(in Spanish,
La fiesta del chivo,
where
fiesta
carries connotations richer than those of a mere “feast,” the notion of unbridled celebration, while
chivo
, “goat,” refers to Trujillo's sexual appetites).

Two ideas crisscross and confront each other in the novel with the inevitability of Greek drama. Vargas Llosa dissects Trujillo himself with a clinical scalpel, not only his psychology but the anatomy of his personal exercise of power. There are the physical traits of domination: a paralyzing gaze, the myth of the man who never sweats, the mania for uniforms and gold and silver braid, but above all the unbridled sexual vanity, at the furthest extreme of our Latin macho culture, that Trujillo practiced for his own pleasure (his
fiesta
) and to impose and express his total control over the subjects of his royal will. Subjection through sexuality stands at the very center of the Trujillo phenomenon. In his own version of the ancient droit de seigneur (the supposed sexual right of a king or a noble to the first night with the virgin wives of his serfs), Trujillo would demand the services of his ministers' wives with the knowledge or at least the silent complicity of their husbands, not only to test the unconditionality of their servitude and obedience but to set himself up as a father to every family, a man with patrimonial rights over his entire island kingdom. This obsessive persecution, this enslaving of the woman to the male, which he himself had witnessed in the heart of his own family, touched a sensitive chord in Vargas Llosa's imagination. The principal character in the book (among a majority of real personages) is the fictional Urania, the daughter of one of Trujillo's loyalists, whose tragic violation represents the suffering of many Dominican women. The plot is driven by her return to Santo Domingo decades after the fall of the regime.