In this environment whitish rented apartment in one of the tallest buildings in Columbus Circus (New York), author of A Fish in the water seemed, indeed, a fish in water. In paradise. As children, pampered, entertained. Childhood ended when he was 11 years and the father (who thought he was dead) returned to his life. Many years later, Nobel those sweet and lead him to paradise lost when the line would pass through adolescence. Now these candies, which are like your grandmother did, you are taken to as far as childhood.
Or not so distant. The Nobel, 74, has those days embedded in the memory as the time that was done almost everything. There she discovered the love absorbed by the mother, father had not assimilated, that this was in heaven or never existed, and found literature in books circulating in the big house with huge family she grew up.
In that book, The fish in the water, tells that story, without which it is unlikely that anyone would have a fair idea of \u200b\u200bwho this man really love and many other crucified. Crucify those who believe it is a reactionary who changed course and betrayed his leftist ideas of the sixties revolution was that any his seat, those who still love or loved him and in the sixties and understand its evolution, or simply have read and know about the literature now endorsed by the Nobel is not worth the topics kneaded with ideologies.
The Swedish Academy, it seemed they would never accept that Vargas Llosa is one of the great writers of the world, finally awarded the Nobel and were also very explicit about the reasons of merit, because has been able to tell the mapping (that said, cartography) power to show their miseries and to express the struggle, the revolt of man for freedom.
A Vargas Llosa amused him the word mapping, but it really excited the rest of the arguments. Said, before a group of friends who met in a bustling Italian restaurant in New York: "What my critics say!". Muted. "No way! Who is dumb I am."
is not dumb, of course not, he awoke from those fourteen minutes of uncertainty. He thought it was a joke, as he spent many years with Alberto Moravia, but fourteen minutes later came the confirmation: Nobel Prize for Literature was 2010. Her daughter Morgan, 36, a photographer, he lived in Lima crying, with her two daughters and her husband, Stefan, his son Gonzalo, 43, diplomat, international civil servant now for UNHCR (United Nations for Refugees) in Santo Domingo, he lived traveling to Haiti, and Alvaro, journalist, 44, heard the story "stupefied, paralyzed, and then happy in the home of Washington where he lives with his wife, Susan, and their three children.
Gonzalo's daughters are in Switzerland, a boarding school. All the grandchildren ("you have to add there to Jurema, my dog," says Alvaro, "which is like another grandchild", from Lima, jump Morgana: "Why do you forget my poor D'Artagnan, who is so old man? ") have lived in a special way this news, which has revolutionized the family life of these people who eat guargueros wherever they are. La de los Vargas, thanks mainly to the ability umbrella Patricia Vargas Llosa's wife also was (or is) raw, is a very strong family, which holds together the summer and Christmas, seeking any reason to join and also relies on hard times. Patricia is the compass of this navigation family, and in times of uncertainty (when Alvaro and Mario quarreled over policy issues related to Peru), she was the one that led to the conflict by allowing a civilized way, and excited, reunion. This took place in Miami, when he was given an award Álvaro, months after the clash, the father, mother and other family members offered to go with Alvaro, and now it says: "I was the culprit", with the same emotion he lived in reconciliation.
So here, in this family, it's all a show live as peaceful, but noisy and coral. And the Nobel would be a earthquake that affected them all differently, but equally shocked everyone. We talked about the grandchildren. Gonzalo says that when it was learned that his grandfather had won the main prize of the world lyrics, his daughter Ariadne, who is ten years old, he expressed concern for your child. Like him, they had poorer grades in school Alvaro, Ariadna not get the best results and the prize was concerned grandfather. He told his father: "I mean that as a grandfather have given this award, maybe now the teachers ask me to take better notes."
A Leandro, the eldest son of Alvaro, who has now 14, was asked at school if her grandfather was someone special. And hid behind her bangs as if to escape from an avalanche. "No, not anyone special," he mumbled. Timid that his nephew, Morgan, who has been our partner in El Pais, and has accompanied his father on some of the more risky adventures (Iraq, Israel, Palestine) or leisure (the scenes of Paradise in the other corner ) had to overcome public withdrawal, and rang the news she was the only family representative could make statements in Lima.
To cure her shyness, the youngest daughter of Vargas had to take three glasses of champagne, and without words still had all the journalists who flocked to Lima pass the family home to offer and talk in the house with white walls from which sees the violent sea Barranco petting coast. The party took such a nature that the grandmother Olga, Patricia's mother, aunt of Mario, 93, left his prostration and apathy to the world, dressed again, put on a colorful scarf around her neck and began to elderly to make representations to all the cameras at the news.
both were encouraged by the news and the agglomeration not only wept whenever he remembered the success of his son's Nobel but dared to say yes, she, as Carmen Balcells (literary agent) and Fernando de Szyslo, artist, perhaps the oldest friend Mario, like many others who have always been close, would also in Stockholm. Sure.
He asked a reporter Dona Olga, whom he also called Olga:
- What you already have a suit? "I was
. But we've waited so long that it is moth-eaten and I have to buy another.
Twenty years have passed. "It's funny," said Alvaro, and also said the person concerned, Mario Vargas Llosa, "many people agree that it's been twenty years since my father deserved the Nobel. Twenty years." Perhaps, given the eldest son, it was because Mario got his big political defeat, and from then it was just a writer. His work until then, no doubt, and deserved the award, commented us. "Yes, but if it had come president," said Álvaro Vargas Llosa, "my father would never have won the Nobel."
So it's true that God came to see him when there was that defeat. Yes, that's the opinion of Morgana. And it is the opinion of the whole family, which otherwise was implicadísima in this campaign that produced both pleasure and pain in Vargas, and even Mario, who sometimes seems immune to the nature of disasters.
But this time, when he lost the election to a candidate, Alberto Fujimori, who later overthrew the democratic order, bloodied the country, stealing, etc., Vargas Llosa fell prey to a decay that we witnessed. He arrived in Paris shortly after the failure, had slimmed down about twenty kilos, emaciation was the thinness of the defeated. His son Alvaro, who made the campaign very closely linked to it, remember this moment as a moment of stupor. Vargas Llosa, Nobel now, could go to one side or the other of the scale, balance, however, helped him overcome the first truly serious lunar trajectory. The parent (you get into a military college, to consider "gayness" his passion for writing, dictatorial character) and was swallowed in memory. But this was new and lost, remember Alvaro, was a tragedy.
As always, as to the disdain of the father, who was a contempt of fate, Mario Vargas Llosa said his son, "was saved by literature." On the campaign read, "Quevedo and Gongora, every morning" and so went out for rallies, "to promise a better Peru for citizens." When he lost, "was considered betrayed by a people who gave the sacrifice of leaving the literature," and that it abused disappointment. Until I got up again, says Alvaro. "I think writing that book, The fish in the water, saved him. He used to keep their experiences a time, as in The City and the Dogs, Conversation in the Cathedral or The Green House, the you swallowed, and then present Hence, many of the trips and experiences their stories are their own travels or experiences. "
But this time, given Álvaro," my father decided to throw down the middle road and write these reports, some political memory, some of it childhood memory. Two stories, two moments of great happiness and after great failure. Dared. "He left made" another man ". The father says the same. Sitting in one of his favorite restaurants in New York, where there guargueros but burgers, Mario Vargas Llosa reminds that frustration that, twenty years later, it obscures his face, now the happy face of a recent Nobel.
"I worked hard," says Mario, "a project he thought good. And the defeat was a big disappointment." But he returned to his own, "what encourages me more." Wrote The fish in the water: "Because I wanted to take my experience of him." "A writer has the advantage that it can turn a failure in literary matters, and that makes it better. The writing is revenge, a revenge of life."
He, therefore, "to the usual routine, and I grabbed an unstoppable pace. In these twenty years, ranging from failure to success (the two impostors just the talking Rudyard Kipling, Nobel also, If poem), has written novels happy, sad novels has made literary and political essays, has made journalism, traveling, has given lectures, has been monumental in trouble (like when angered Octavio Paz, his friend, calling from Mexico PRI perfect dictatorship), has braved the common place of conservatism (especially repeat that, as in the famous story, his books have done what Sofia Mazagatos: do not read but the judge), and ultimately has experienced the ups and downs of any existence "with the enthusiasm and joy of knowing that life is worth living."
To do all that it was necessary to "keep fit, care, travel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, has been necessary to go to Congo, the Amazon, the Pacific in search of Gauguin. The truth is I have not stopped. And I will not stop "Mario Vargas Llosa says," while you have enthusiasm and curiosity and I head to work, which so far I think I'm still working. The old terrifies me while I can not keep moving. I approach death without thinking about it, not fear it . While I work I am invulnerable. "
has changed. A lot. Morgan would never have believed that this work would be obsessed by a day so good caregiver for their grandchildren, with whom he plays and which is completely devoted to the limit of the antics that the kids satisfied. It is more cheerful, create Alvaro and Gonzalo think something that has always taken into account in their relationship with their children, and now the children's children, "is the experience with his father, never wanted to be the man authoritarian that he had over in his adolescence. " That experience, which the painful Mario confesses, "was a stimulating influence for my father to treat us with great touch," according to Alvaro.
Gonzalo recalls some episodes that illustrate the evolution of the parent-child relationship. When this young servant of the UN help refugees was a boy of 16 years decided to take Rastafarian, hair is left to shoulder, began to smoke marijuana and listen to reggae, and for two years repeatedly disregarded warnings from his father to abandon the drift. Gonzalo was a rebel, now he remembers that his father had on him two perspectives: that of the father and the writer: "That turned her attitude towards me in an attitude somewhat complicit." Until he wrote his famous article Rastafarian My son in which he threw into the world, with humor and condescension, as well as a family drama, Gonzalo said: "It was also an issue for journalism and for literature." Gonzalo looks now that episode was almost like his father: "But then I felt the need to rebel, like my father did many times with his own father, and I think that's why I understood it then."
And Gonzalo has more revealing life relationship that has been sweetened to extremes that Mario himself confesses fun: the one parent who got to read to the compulsory school leaving, "when all our friends were playing football, we passed a father and a grandfather who dresses as Santa Claus and is capable of carrying the children so that they do whatever they want with it. But that mild dictatorship that made the father Must be read "Let a discipline." "I myself," says Gonzalo, "back at the experience of reading every day as one of the most valuable influences in my relationship with him."
Times have changed, that the defeat of 1990 gave way to this other moment of life. But some resentment, some settling of accounts will be in the cracks, I asked in this typically American restaurant where they ate a typical burger, at noon. Do not feel like self-expression of a revenge that Fujimori is in jail?
No, what goes. "Fujimori is not defeated me, was a majority of Peruvian voters. I never attacked while remain a democracy, but he obviously broke the rules by which system had come to power, and the crimes he committed is now serving sentence . But I never had the temptation to wish an end as well. Nor is it in my capacity as the reckoning. But I'm glad of a fair trial. "
At this time, in these twenty years that cross the life from failure to success, has written novels in which sex is alternated with the adventure, and others such as The Feast of the Goat or the ultimate dream the Celtic, which ventures into the ways of evil, and although he acts as the counter there, the narrator explores the way to present the story as if using a mirror, it is clear that he wants to transfer the moral commitment behind all his work of this nature. "The description of evil," he says, "forces a moral awareness. If we do not stop in time the destructive capacity of human beings, the result is the horror has happened in the past, and now that democracy slows horror. It's an obsessive theme for me in recent years. It is a recurring theme, is in Congo, in this novel, is in the Amazon, in The War of the End of the World is Lituma terrorist madness, and is, without doubt, in these two novels are saying. But in my journalism, look what I've done in Iraq, in Palestine, in Afghanistan. "
Hell on every corner." And the heavens? Mario Has rediscovered paradise? The author of Paradise in the other corner, the novel in which Gauguin is stirred like a nightmare at times joyful, is aware that this paradise was spoiled, loved, pampered by the whole family, "until he reached the father" , will never return. "There is this real-life haven." But having lost it "should not be a tragedy. "Thanks to that," he continues, "because my father got me into a military school, because I sometimes viciously stopped being a writer, I had an experience that gave me the opportunity to write a great literary material. If that had not happened, I probably would not have been a writer. And yes, writing is a pleasure, you can leave any terrible circumstances, it takes you to defend against any adversity. In this sense writing is my paradise. "
And paradise is the family. I asked Morgana Vargas Llosa does it mean the father figure of Patricia, the mother." Inseparable companion is not which my father would not be nothing. "Morgana says his father did not know the number of your home, do not even know your address, is unable to change a light bulb, completely unaware of how to set up a washing machine and has never fried an egg. But this morning, I say, his father explained to me, contrary to the opinion of his mother, the apartment where they live now in New York pays for it and not the university. A detail that is attentive, eh, Morgan? "What is. Trust my mother. Here again it will be right."
Soon after I shot on the fly what Mario told some French reporters: "I know my mail, never grab a ringing phone, I can not use cell phones. And just remember the first issue we had when we got married 45 years ago. 46 40 60.
How not to introduce into this string of Nobel's family views Carmen Balcells Vargas, the mother of several generations of great writers, and especially the large Mama Mario. Once Carmen Balcells raised him from the seat of their hard labor in London and started writing. I sat, so to speak, in Heaven. That paradise was a disruption that could have been eternal, when politics attracted him too. In this failure is made up another man. The kids think that piece of paradise where you now live with the Nobel prize for Literature has not been possible if Patricia had not been there, making the writer's dreams become insistent point that now reward him in Sweden.
the Saturday following the grant of the Nobel, Vargas told his agent, Carmen Balcells, the Peruvian radio: "How could seduce the twenty judges of the Swedish Academy!". With the same humor, grandma boom authors (García Márquez, Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar) said: "I have my money!".
Both know that is not true. The key to this paradise is up to the genius who knew Carmen Patricia glimpse and care taken care as a child, grandchild, husband or a dream. Caring grandmother's recipe guargueros, the unforgettable taste of paradise.
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