It is nearing midnight, and Mario Vargas Llosa is tired from a long day of tending to last-minute business. The world-renowned novelist leaves the Lan Chile ticket counter at Lima`s international airport and is besieged by old friends and complete strangers who walk up to him and shake his hand.
There are military officers glaring behind black-tinted sunglasses, large families dressed in their Sunday finest, little old ladies on hand to see their own sons off on trips. It is the usual tumultuous scene at Third World airports in the dead of night when a plane is about to leave.
They crowd around, and some stop and tell Vargas Llosa how much they admire him and that they wish him good luck. Wearily but patiently, Vargas Llosa flashes a ready smile and shakes hands, slapping his arm around men`s shoulders in camaraderie as he tries to make his way to a private airline lounge upstairs.
The tall, slim author and his elegant wife, Patricia, are waiting to board a flight that will take them to New York and on to Washington. From there they will go on a monthlong swing through Western Europe.
It is a business trip, but the man whom many describe as the national conscience of his native Peru-and as one of the world`s most important writers-is not off to see his agents or publishers. He will be meeting with executives of the World Bank, officials of the Reagan administration and diplomats and legislators in capitals from Bonn to Paris.
The itinerary is all part of the dizzying and sometimes baffling new world of politics and high finance that Vargas Llosa, 52, has plunged into with the same single-mindedness that once launched him on his literary career. Friends have warned him of the risks, to his literary reputation, to his life. But now the storyteller who has delighted millions of readers with his vivid imagery and magical metaphors for the joys and heartbreaks of Latin American life has a new vision: He wants to be the president of Peru.
Even now, surrounded by bodyguards everywhere he goes, Vargas Llosa can hardly believe it himself.
”It is like going from heaven to hell,” Vargas Llosa says of his transition from writer to politician. ”Writing is my true calling, not politics. It was circumstances. This wasn`t planned, but circumstances dictated it. If my country were not what it is, politics would be a very secondary concern in my life.”
Peru, by any measure, is on the brink of disaster. A discredited populist government is flat broke, besieged by foreign creditors and waves of violent labor unrest. A largely illiterate and impoverished population is reeling from food shortages and hyperinflation topping 1,000 percent a year.
Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas are engaged in a bloody war that has killed more than 15,000 people in the last seven years. The remote eastern jungle areas are the province of guerrillas and powerful drug- traffickers who produce most of the world`s cocaine supply.
Right-wing death squads operate increasingly in the open. And the military is restless, debating whether to overthrow the elected government and return the nation to the dictatorship it thought had been left behind just eight years ago.
Like a latter-day Daniel, Vargas Llosa enters this lion`s den with faith but trepidation. To his considerable surprise, he finds himself leading a nascent center-right movement that wants to open up Peru`s closed, state-dominated economy and prevent a Marxist government from taking power.
”The country is living in a grave time of emergency that could result in the destruction of the democratic system,” Vargas Llosa says. ”We have to defend democracy against the military and against the extreme Left.”
His main challenger, popular former Lima Mayor Alfonso Barrantes, leads a Marxist coalition that now is favored to win the presidential elections scheduled for 1990. Vargas Llosa respects Barrantes` political skills and his dedication to democracy. But he fears a Marxist victory at the polls might only invite more violence, economic misery and a military coup.
Barrantes is likewise kind in his words about Vargas Llosa. The author is well-intentioned and he certainly is well-known, the leftist leader says.
”But it would be difficult for me to convert myself into a great writer in two or three years,” Barrantes says. ”I don`t know how he can covert himself into a great political leader in two or three years. He has talent, but a lot of people have talent, and they can`t become great novelists.”
These were supposed to be the golden years for Vargas Llosa, when he could be excused for sitting back and basking in his international acclaim and enjoying the fruits of his hard-earned financial success. Instead he has chosen to run the marathon of his life, and he is sprinting all the way.
Vargas Llosa has been traveling Peru`s mountains and back roads, making appearances in small towns and visiting the long-neglected Indians of the highlands and the jungles. He has gone into the larger urban strongholds of rival leftist parties, challenging their populist claim on Peru`s poor and disaffected.
Abroad he uses his considerable name and reputation to see powerful bankers and politicians to press his case for foreign understanding and aid in Peru`s time of crisis.
He says he is still uncomfortable in crowds and hates public speaking, the simplification of complicated ideas into sometimes mindless slogans and, too often, empty promises. In Latin America, historically a land of great orators, the best border on the demagogic, framing the hard realities of poverty and misery in fire and brimstone and simple solutions that never seem to work.
But Vargas Llosa has swallowed his distaste, taken speaking lessons and learned to shorten his message. He admires British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Spain`s Felipe Gonzalez, a socialist who helped consolidate Spanish democracy. Now Vargas Llosa is on a crusade is to spread the warning against what he sees as Latin American democracy`s greatest enemies: military dictatorship, stifling statist economies and Marxist totalitarianism.
Like Dorothy, he knows he is no longer in Kansas.
”Politics is an activity that always brings out the worst in people,”
he says. ”There is an inevitable violent element in politics that I find difficult to accept. Everything that deals with power is corrupting. You have to try very hard to maintain standards, not just moral but intellectual standards, and not bow to the temptations to be a demagogue.”
It is, he says, a strange transition for a man who has spent almost his entire adult life in blissful solitude, immersed in his writing. For years he stayed out of the public eye, living modestly here and in a home in London, commenting only occasionally about current events.
”It`s a slow, difficult process of adaptation,” he says. ”Politics is a different rhythm, a different process. Literature is different, it`s leaving reality for something more permanent. Politics is the opposite, it`s living in reality but where the concrete results are very small, incremental and temporary.”
Five years ago Vargas Llosa stepped out of the shadows to head a government commission established to investigate the ax murders of eight Peruvian journalists at the hands of frightened villagers in the Andes highlands ravaged by the Sendero war.
The investigation was widely praised as thorough and fair. His written account of that episode and the primitive conditions borne by the Indian descendants of the ancient Incas stands as an eloquent testimony for those trying to understand the roots of Peru`s bloody guernation by announcing plans to nationalize all of Peru`s banks, Vargas Llosa denounced the move as a demagogic measure that would shatter investor confidence and deepen the country`s economic crisis.
To Vargas Llosa`s surprise, his attacks against the bank nationalization plan and Garcia`s statist policies of government ownership and strict regulation of key sectors of the economy had a resounding echo with the millions of poor street peddlers and small merchants who constitute an underground economy that keeps Peru from total collapse.
Vargas Llosa`s message also was welcomed by wealthy and middle-class Peruvians who feared that Garcia intended to confiscate and nationalize other private property after he finished with the banks.
Almost overnight, an ad-hoc odd-couple alliance between the rich and traditional conservatives and a large sector of the working urban poor sprang up. Faced with this vocal opposition, Garcia backed off, in the end nationalizing only two banks and abandoning his plans for the rest.
All of a sudden, like it or not, Mario Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian political leader. A year later polls show he is the second-most-popular politician in the country, his Liberty Movement backed by more than a third of all voters.
”It was a surprise,” Vargas Llosa says of his rapid political rise.
”But it gave us a great hope to see that in this poor country we could mobilize so many poor people to defend a principle. For the first time, that gave me and a lot of people the hope we could make a profound change in the country.”
All his life, it seems, Mario Vargas Llosa has never let convention or appearances stand in his way.
Born in the small Peruvian town of Arequipa into an old landowning family down on its luck, Vargas Llosa was brought up by his mother and grandparents in less-than-modest circumstances in Cochabamba, Bolivia, after his father left home.
As a teenager, he wanted nothing more than to become a writer. No matter that native Peru had little history of great writers. Virtually none were known beyond the Andes, which formed a cultural barrier to the rest of Latin America and the Western literary world. This was also before other great Latin American writers, such as Argentina`s late Jorge Luis Borges and Colombia`s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, began to receive attention abroad.
”To be a writer at that time in Peru was ridiculous,” said Vargas Llosa`s close friend, architect Miguel Cruchaga Belaunde. ”There were no great writers. There was no one in Peru who could earn a living being a writer. To become a writer at that time obligated him to a truly impossible life.”
But something burned inside young Vargas Llosa. Moving to Lima, he wrote his first play at 16, ”The Flight of the Inca.” He enrolled in the University of San Marcos, where Michael Dukakis spent a summer around the same time as an exchange student, and took up the study of letters in earnest.
He wrote for local magazines and worked nights writing news and scripts for radio and television. In the mornings he wrote short stories and the first pages of what would later become material for his books.
At 18, Vargas Llosa`s ardor turned elsewhere. Julia Urquidi, the sister-in-law of his uncle, was visiting Lima and staying in his uncle`s home. She was at least 10 years his senior, but Vargas Llosa fell in love with her. The family was horrified.
Deaf to their pleas, the two ran off across the mountains, taking few possessions. Finally they found a shoeless judge in a backwater Peruvian town who would agree to marry them. In time a literary prize brought a free trip to Paris, where the couple decided to settle among the writers and bohemians that had attracted so many before them.
Eight years later, his 15-year-old cousin Patricia came to live with them in France. Vargas Llosa promptly fell in love with her. Three years later he divorced Aunt Julia and married his cousin, appalling the family once again.
Looking back, his life reads like one of the richly textured, improbable novels for which Vargas Llosa is famous. And, in fact, it is.
In 1977 he wrote a thinly veiled novel titled ”Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” about his youth and his intimate relationship with his aunt. He dedicated the book to her, and it became the basis for a television series that was broadcast throughout Latin America five years ago.
Angered by her portrayal in the TV series, Aunt Julia struck back with her own book, ”What Varguitas Didn`t Say,” using her diminutive nickname for her nephew/ex-husband. In it she tells of the good times, as well as her agonizing over suspicions that Vargas Llosa was having an affair with his young cousin.
In almost any other part of the world, the entire affair would be a scandal that would preclude Vargas Llosa from any thought of a political career. For that matter, so might some of the erotic passages he has sprinkled through his writings. But not, it seems, in Peru.
”People don`t mind that about him at all. In fact, that makes him even more popular,” said Hugo Guerra, editorial page editor of the prestigious Lima daily El Comercio.
”People in Peru have a deep erotic side, and so the episodes about his wives and the extremely erotic passages in his novels have touched a popular nerve here. It all makes him more human.”
Vargos Llosa is the first to admit that it is one thing to reach an audience through his writings, or even through a single, emotional issue that can fan the political flames of a nation. It is quite another to become its president.
Many of Vargas Llosa`s enemies, and a good number of his friends, tell him he cannot do it, that he is crazy even to try. They say he is naive and idealistic, that he lacks the experience and the stomach to lead his ancient, bloodied land from a rendezvous with doom.
Vargas Llosa shrugs off the pessimists, taking to his new task with the same dedication that had convinced many literary critics he is destined to win the Nobel Prize for Literature someday.
Arguably one of Latin America`s top two living writers, alongside Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa could already count the international acclaim he has received in the millions of copies his books have sold across the continent and in the U.S. and Europe.
The author of such novels as ”The Time of the Heroes,” ”The Green House,” ”Conversations in the Cathedral” and ”The War of the End of the World” long has been hailed by critics as one of the most eloquent voices in the Third World. His books shape lively, metaphorical tales through an imaginative prism that reflects and celebrates the grim and bizarre realities of Latin American life.
The Nobel Prize may not be in the picture anymore, Vargas Llosa admits. It is not likely the judges would look kindly on one of the world`s leading novelists leaving his art behind to take a leap of faith into the political arena, particularly when his message is not a fashionable one.
Writer-politicians are nothing new in Latin America, where there is a long tradition of authors and poets ascending to political power. In Peru itself, Vice President Luis Alberto Sanchez, 87, has written more than 100 books.
In Venezuela, Jose Luis Rodriguez, the continent`s most popular ballad singer, is mentioned as a possible future president. Salsa singer Ruben Blades, a popular composer and actor who starred in Robert Redford`s ”Milagro Beanfield War,” has spoken of someday becoming president of his native Panama.
Elsewhere, several members of Nicaragua`s leftist Sandinista regime were recognized poets and writers before they became revolutionaries. Brazilian President Jose Sarney has written short stories and poems in Portuguese that have been translated into English, Spanish, French and Russian.
Two other prominent Latin American writers, Venezuela`s Romulo Gallegos and the Dominican Republic`s Juan Bosch, both rose to power as elected presidents in their respective countries, only to be overthrown in military coups for their leftist views.
Mexico`s Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, two frequent candidates for the Nobel Prize, have served as ambassadors in their nation`s diplomatic service. Colombia`s Marquez, while never holding public office, is a vocal supporter of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. And the list goes on.
Vargas Llosa is virtually unique, however, in that he bucks the leftist thinking long fashionable among Latin American intellectuals. This has made him a pariah among the continent`s cultural elite, who dismiss him as a right- wing reactionary. Of Latin America`s leading writers, only Paz, who has long denounced Castro and communism, as well as U.S. imperialism, is similarly loathed by some.
Vargas Llosa objects to his label as a rightist, a term that has become an epithet in Latin America, but he blames traditional Latin intellectuals for many of the daunting problems facing the hemisphere. In particular he scorns the Marxist visionaries who have led tens of thousands of young men to fight and die in the name of elusive causes.
”Unfortunately, we in Latin America still live under a very antiquated philosophy that puts too much emphasis on the hegemony of the state as the great catalyst,” he says. ”This has prevented our development.
”This has been a characteristic of almost all Latin American regimes, of the Right and Left, military and civilian, with very few exceptions. This is antimodern, antihistorical, against the tide of history.
”In order to grow, in order to become modern societies, we need to complete the liberalization with an economic freedom which we`ve never had in our history. The military are not able to solve Latin America`s problems. People do not want dictatorship, they want democracy.
Vargas Llosa might never become the President of Peru, but even his enemies agree that he enters the chase with his credibility beyond question. No one accuses him of seeking office out of ego or vanity or lust for power. Even his political opponents say this is a man who, for better or worse, is doing what he believes is right.
”His motives are beyond all question,” says his friend Cruchaga, a fellow leader of Vargas Llosa`s Liberty Movement. ”He has tremendous moral authority. His life now, with all the bodyguards and everything, is intolerable. One of the reasons I admire him so much is the grace and good humor with which he accepts the horrible prison his life has become.”
For now, Vargas Llosa continues his lifelong routine of barricading himself inside his study and writing for at least four hours every morning. However his political quest turns out, he is asked, will all this be something he will write about?
He grins at the thought. ”For me it`s a great sacrifice to stop writing,” he says. Then he smiles again, the look of an author already working on his next book.
