A Fish in the Water
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Helen Lane
Farrar Straus Giroux, 532 pages, $25
In an early draft, a much shorter version of Mario Vargas Llosa’s memoir was called “A Fish Out of Water,” referring to the author’s loss of a grueling three-year campaign (1987-90) for the presidency of Peru. Now fleshed out with extensive political and economic analyses, the text combines autobiography of youth with an account of his efforts on the hustings.
The crucial prepositional change of the current title tells us what the book has become-a thickly textured essay on the tensions of one man’s passionately ambivalent patriotism. But the story is broadly representative as well, for Vargas Llosa’s dilemma echoes that of many other Latin American writers who have fled their politically unstable lands, plagued by oppressive provincialism and estrangement from the modern cosmopolitan West. Some have suffered political exile, but others, like Vargas Llosa, simply dreamed of the day they could discover the world in Paris, Madrid, London or Rome. For this particular dreamer-the author of several novels among the finest of recent decades (“The Time of the Hero,” “Conversation in the Cathedral,” “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter”)-Paris was the mecca and Gustave Flaubert the tutelary deity.
One string of alternating chapters in the book ends with the young writer’s departure for France in 1958; the other recreates the exhausting and dangerous campaign that carried him to every corner of Peru. The result is two loosely contrapuntal trajectories-one outward bound from Vargas Llosa’s bittersweet early life, the other of return and immersion in the struggle for his country’s future.
In the distinctly more engaging centrifugal account, the precocious author becomes a journalist, a scriptwriter and, briefly, a Communist militant while finishing high school in the coastal desert town of Piura and attending the University of San Marcos in Lima. At age 19, he marries his aunt Julia (not blood kin), whom he will later divorce to marry his first cousin Patricia. Aged 22, he receives a prize trip to Paris and so begins a long period of residence abroad.
The more prosaic centripetal story, separated by over three decades from the earlier one, chronicles the novelist’s decision to run on a progressive free-market platform that would have turned back incumbent president Alan Garcia’s failing program of “statism” (nationalization of banks and key industries, increasing government economic controls).
The economy of Peru took a disastrous turn in the late 1980s, and Vargas Llosa, after much deliberation, became the candidate for Libertad, a democratic centrist reform movement. Soon obliged to ally himself with conservative pro-business interests, he seemed to gather momentum and, for a time, was the virtually uncontested front-runner. The eventual victor seemed to come from nowhere: Alberto Fujimori, a native-born agricultural engineer of Japanese parentage, who emerged as a major contender only after splitting the reform vote with his rival and forcing a runoff election.
One must admire the author’s decision, in his comfortable early 50s, to risk both life and literary career against a set of seemingly intractable national problems. Accustomed to spending part of each year in London, where his children were in school, he began returning frequently to Peru as it plunged toward civic and economic collapse. The Shining Path Maoist guerrilla movement controlled and had brutalized large areas of the country`s mountainous interior, extending their forays even into Lima itself. Grinding poverty was endemic, as was a deeply rooted pattern of racism (Hispanic whites over and against indigenous peoples, mestizos and immigrants of color) and religious tension (conservative Catholics troubled by a burgeoning Protestant evangelism).
Indeed, the centuries-old poison of class and caste distinctions reached into every corner of Peruvian life, as the author notes in asserting the “real reason” for his parents’ early divorce. It was caused, he believes, by “the national disease . . . that infests every stratum and every family in the country. . . . Because Ernesto J. Vargas, despite his white skin, his light blue eyes and his handsome appearance, belonged . . . to a family socially inferior to his wife’s.”
In such a society, to preach economic reform and the redemption of the brutally poor masses would seem quixotic-even more so when the preacher is a brilliant man of letters to the marrow. Here too, however, one sees a characteristic Latin American pattern: the literary intellectual cannot forego engagement.
The national reality is too horrible to ignore; moreover, it does not spawn the specialization of roles typical of more advanced societies, wherein politicians rarely write novels and novelists are trained in the university rather than the Grub Street of Lima that was Vargas Llosa’s early school. In any case, the most hectic campaign schedule never kept this candidate from devoting some refreshing moments each day to his beloved Luis de Gongora, the great Spanish Baroque poet. Whenever possible, he also reread Malraux, Melville, Faulkner and Borges.
Almost disingenuously, Vargas Llosa notes himself “(a) bit unnerved at discovering how little intellect-how little intelligence-is involved in the daily round of political tasks.” Repulsed by the sweaty press of large crowds, he worked to mask his aversion when, campaigning in his beloved Piura of youthful memory, he confronted a mass that “appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were indistinguishable.” He trekked on until delivered from his labors by his loss to Fujimori in June 1990. Three days later he flew off to Europe, where he has since become a Spanish citizen and returned to his writing.
Much of this book is engaging and informative, but it becomes at times slack, even gossipy, and assumes an interest in the nuances of Peruvian political and literary life shared by very few American readers. When the author portrays the night-world of Lima dives and brothels and the hectic round of his duties as a reporter, a newswriter and an admired professor’s research assistant, he creates scenes and characters of a Dickensian richness. Then his muse sings, though she quickly abandons him in the alternating chapters of recent political history. Because his pulse beats strongest to the flight of fancy, it is with obvious relief that the novelist redivivus finally takes off from Lima for Paris, thinking “that this departure resembled the one in 1958, which had so clearly marked the end of one stage of my life and the beginning of another, in which literature came to occupy the central place.”
Thus the two separate narratives of the book achieve a kind of connection. Left for another book is the story of some 30 years during which Vargas Llosa created the novels that have brought him fame.
To the author’s credit, he bore manfully the burden of politics, but he mourned the suspension of his literary life. One rejoices that defeat allowed this splendid storyteller to return to his writings. They have, after all, enhanced for so many of us the capacity to tolerate our own existence.
