Enrique
Krauze

Thinking of the Peruvian Nobel laureate author Mario Vargas Llosa just a few weeks before he died at the age of 89, I remembered a poem that has been sung at the Passover Seder since the ninth century. Titled “Dayenu” (“it would have been enough”), it expresses gratitude for the successive wonders that the Israelites experienced during their 40-year journey from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land. Taken out of its religious context, though, the song sounds more natural and permanent. It captures the cumulative gratitude felt by children toward their parents, by students toward their teachers, and – indeed by readers toward Vargas Llosa.

If Vargas Llosa had ad given us only his works of fiction, it would have been enough. Think of the many adventures his novels, short stories, and plays have allowed us to experience vicariously. How grateful we should be for the subtle, daring, and innovative construction of his plots, his unforgettable characters, and his prose, which is not at all baroque, but rather precise, rich, and transparent.

Recall his novel Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta), with its radiographic examination of guerrilla fanaticism in Latin America. This twisted Catholic religiosity, radicalized toward Marxism and in love with its self-proclaimed virtue, filled the region with death, only for its practitioners to look back with no real conscience or memory of responsibility for the tragedies it caused. Vargas Llosa saw right through it.

Or recall La guerra del fin del mundo (The War at the End of the World), his great Tolstoyan epic that painted a canvas worthy of Bruegel or Bosch. It had everything: brutal assassins, legendary bandits, implacable cangaceiros, sinful priests, circus dwarfs, prostitutes, blessed men and women, converted merchants. Here was a story of misery, but also of redemption.

And let us not forget La fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), a hallucinatory and definitive portrait of the quintessential Latin American dictator that is also a window on the society and the environment that applauds him, and which sometimes, in a cry of freedom, finally exorcises him. There was nothing more remote to Vargas Llosa than the worshipful fascination with power that is so characteristic of our culture and our literature, and there was nothing more remarkable about his work than his capacity to channel his repulsion toward the recreation of evil.

Literature, in his hands, became the best revenge. But he also saw the necessity of dreaming of a better world. Such was the motif of El Paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise), his portrait of Flora Tristán, the nineteenth-century French-Peruvian activist closely linked to Peru’s history, the history of art, and an idea – perhaps buried in our time – that obsessed Vargas Llosa and had obsessed humanity for 500 years: Utopia.

In the same genre, Vargas Llosa’s Tiempos recios (Hard Times) stands out, given its look at the US-backed coup d’état that toppled Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. Without that act of incomprehension and arrogance by the United States – reflected in characters that foreshadow Donald Trump – the communist drift in Latin America, which we continue to pay for, cannot be explained.

If Vargas Llosa had given us only his novels, that would have been enough. Yet he also gave us extraordinary works of nonfiction. La utopía arcaica (Archaic Utopia), for example, is a painful, empathetic examination of Peruvian indigenism; and his autobiography, El pez en el agua (A Fish in the Water), exorcizes the personal legacy of his arduous 1990 campaign for the Peruvian presidency –a courageous act that presaged greater freedom on the continent. By settling scores with himself, he allowed readers to see past the tears and pain of his childhood to its refuges and redemptions, and thus gain a deeper appreciation of his passion for literature and freedom.

If Vargas Llosa had given us only his novels and his non-fiction books, that, too, would have been enough. Yet he also gave a vast and acute body of reportage and journalistic commentary. In the 1970s, he moved from liberation to freedom, from the rationalist and revolutionary French universe to the empirical and liberal English one. Then came the 1980s, when Octavio Paz’s Vuelta confronted right-wing dictatorships and left-wing revolutions alike. It was there, in the pages of our monthly magazine, that Vargas Llosa fought many of his battles, including his heartbreaking report on the 1983 Uchuraccay massacre of eight Peruvian journalists.

If Vargas Llosa had left us his fiction, his monographs and essays, and his journalism, that would have been enough. But he also engaged in politics. His fight for the Peruvian presidency was the harbinger of an era of freedom that now seems forgotten – though we still hope for its return. In 2002, he created the International Foundation for Liberty, which brought together liberal thinkers, to promote practical solutions to the region’s problems. With his usual bravado, Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s left-wing caudillo, challenged Vargas Llosa to a public debate, and the latter, with his usual bravery, accepted. At the last minute, Chávez, predictably, backed down.

If throughout more than a half-century of literary and intellectual activity our paths had never crossed, I would still be grateful. But to my immense good fortune, our paths did cross, and I was able to accompany Mario on his long and courageous liberal journey. At times, I noticed him wearing a sad expression, presumably in response to some desolate spectacle in the world. But then, suddenly and naturally, a smile would appear. There was a stoic soldier in his soul, always ready to respond to evil with imagination, irony, humor, intelligence, and an inexhaustible moral combativeness.

As it happens, death came on the first night of Passover. So, I say Dayenu in your memory, dear Mario. Our Promised Land is literature, your literature.

Published by Project Syndicate on April 15th, 2025.