On the death of Mario Vargas Llosa - a conversation from 2004

The death of the Nobel Prize winning Peruvian writer has just been announced. Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima, Peru on Sunday April 13th at the age of eighty-nine.

I interviewed him at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2004.

In addition to discussing the nature of power and dictatorships, the conversation turned to the author's own brief moment as a Peruvian Presidential aspirant ... a campaign that was a spectacular failure, due mainly to the candidate's lack of appetite for power.

Ramona Koval: Mario Vargas Llosa, began in Peru as a self-described 'mischievous child and cry-baby, innocent as a lily,' and now is a citizen of the world. Novelist, art and literary critic, football commentator, film buff, political essayist, autobiographer, short story writer, playwright and perhaps one could say, spectacularly failed politician.

But as you'll no doubt hear in our conversation, that can only be a compliment in the circumstances.

His novel The Feast of the Goat, recreates the final days of the dictatorship of General Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. We see the typical cruel, despotic and corrupt Trujillo at the height of his political power in 1961, but failing in his body, and just before his assassination. We also follow the story of his assassins, some of whom used to be his supporters. And there's a third story of the daughter of a discredited Trujillo supporter, who returns to Santo Domingo after a long self-exile in the United States of America.

So we begin with Mario Vargas Llosa reading from the beginning of his novel, The Feast of the Goat.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Thank you very much. I'm going to read an extract of the first chapter of the novel. [reading]

Ramona Koval: Thank you. [applause] Her story is very much a loss of innocence in this book. And I think that's a theme, the loss of innocence, that perhaps you have been interested in for a long time.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Oh yes. I think I have been. I first had the idea of this novel in 1975. I went up to the Dominican Republic then for a film made out of one of my novels. And I stay there seven, eight months, and during this time I heard so many stories, testimonies-and also I read so many things about what was life during the thirty-one years of the Trujillo era, the thirty-one years of the dictatorship-that I became really, well...fascinated, a bit terrified too, because I think the Trujillo dictatorship was like the climax of a very Latin-American phenomenon. A phenomenon of totalitarianism, of dictatorship, of the macho man.

But I think Trujillo was the expression in the most extreme way of all the brutality, all the excesses and distortions of this kind of political phenomenon. So since then I started to read and to take notes and so it was a very, very long project.

Ramona Koval: Your Trujillo is a study of this dictator; it's a dance of power and humiliation, self-humiliation in his failing sexual powers, in his failing to control his bladder; and his humiliation of supporters as well. Can you talk about how power and humiliation go hand in hand in this kind of character?

Mario Vargas Llosa: I think one of the most depressing aspects of a dictatorship, any kind of dictatorship, is that when you study it, when you investigate, when you approach the phenomenon, you discover that a dictatorship wouldn't be possible without many accomplices. Many, many accomplices. In certain cases-in most cases, I would say-with a large support of society for very different reasons, but in a given moment, it as if a very large section of a society decides to abdicate their right to be free, to participate in social and political life; and to transfer these rights to a big man. And without this abdication, I don't think someone like Trujillo or all these great dictators in history would have been possible.

Ramona Koval: But he humiliates the men around him, the very men who give him their support.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Yes. Trujillo, he was not a cultivated man. He was very uncultivated. But he had this instinct that many dictators have, and he detected very rapidly human weakness. He knew what was the point in each person that he could use to destroy the independence of this person...One of his methods, for example, to have this total control, was to create around even his closest collaborators this feeling of total insecurity. So even his closest-not friends, because I don't think he had friends-but very close collaborators knew that they were not secure in their jobs, in the trust of Trujillo; that everything could change from one day to the other. And that was the reason why they were fighting between themselves, to demonstrate to Trujillo that they could surpass the rest in servility, in admiration.

But this was something that reaches very large sections of society. In a given moment, he had such a control of society that he could do very crazy and absurd things and the whole of the society accepted. For example when he appointed as General his elder son, he was I think eleven years old. And this was in an official ceremony in the streets, with a military march. And people were there, applauding this very young-the youngest General of the Dominican Army-a boy of eleven years. It's comic but at the same time it's very, very sad.

People were deeply corrupt. Even the Opposition was involved in this kind of farcical life. And I think this was the most sad aspect of not only the Trujillo dictatorship, I think of all dictatorships-the kind of corruption of the souls that also is a dictatorship.

Ramona Koval: So as a writer, though, you chose to show him from the inside out, a man who's failing, who's impotent, who's incontinent. Why was it important to show his body falling apart?

Mario Vargas Llosa: You know, I chose to describe Trujillo in the last period of his life because I didn't want to give the idea of Trujillo as a monster, as something that is not human. I think this is one of the big mistakes of the novels about dictators, that they present dictators as if they were inhuman characters. No, what I wanted to show is that he was human, and that he became a monster little by little because he accumulated such a power that he was transformed into a monster.

When you have total power, you become a-but he became a monster. And I think the way in which I could humanise this monster was presenting him to the reader at the end of his life when everything started to collapse around himself. He was abandoned by the Catholic church which had supported him many, many years. He was abandoned by the United States. Conspiracies were appearing everywhere in the Dominican Republic. So he felt that he was deeply threatened by many-and on the other hand, physically he had been so proud of his strength, he was the macho man. And at the end he was impotent.

So he was hurt in the centre of what he thought was the symbol of his power, his virility. That was the reason why he was called el chivo, the goat. The goat is a sexual symbol in the Dominican Republic. So I thought that presenting him at this period of his life, at the end, in total decline, he could be more humane than if I presented him in the maximum apogee of his power when he was really a monster.

Ramona Koval: You're very much the master of time in this book. We know what's going to happen, because we know it's based on something that happened and we know that there's going to be an assassination, but you manage to have mystery and suspense all the way through. And even in that first part, I think the way you write that-with memories and the mirror and questions of being there before-you are playing with time. I wanted to ask you how you manage time in this book.

Mario Vargas Llosa: I think time is always a creation in a novel. Time in a novel is like one of the invented characters. Time in a novel is never like time in real life. No, it's something that you invent. It's something that you create for the specific goals of the novel. In certain periods, life advances very quickly; in certain periods stops, returns, goes backwards-or jumps. All this is a creation.

Time is a very artificial invention. And I think this is one of the methods that a novelist has, to create the impression of a totality, of something that is aesthetic, a story that is aesthetical, self-sufficient. For me this is very, very important, to present a story completely closed, in which everything is inside the story. And for this, well, I have to invent a narrator; I have to decide what will be told in the story and what would be just suggested or silence. And I have to invent time, a chronological structure. Something that is, I would say, a very exciting aspect of writing a novel.

Ramona Koval: And a different time invention for every book?

Mario Vargas Llosa: Oh yes, because I don't think there are two stories that are similar.

Ramona Koval: Your Trujillo hates art and poetry.

Mario Vargas Llosa: He despise..

Ramona Koval: Sorry, yes, despise...

Mario Vargas Llosa: He despise. But he was happy to be surrounded by poets. One of the most extraordinary, farcical aspects of Trujillo was that his wife became the most read Dominical author in Dominican history. Actually she didn't write the books; a Spanish exile who was her secretary wrote for her a play and a book of moral thoughts. And this play was permanently produced during the whole years of the regime. And the book, by Mrs Trujillo, was studied in the schools and in the universities. And there was a memorial, signed by all the important writers and intellectuals of the time, asking the Nobel Prize for Mrs Trujillo. [laughter]

Ramona Koval: But do you think that it's a necessary recipe for a dictatorship, that you should despise art and poetry?

Mario Vargas Llosa: Not necessarily, you know. There are dictators that could debate it.

Ramona Koval: But they would have had a certain kind of preference for a certain kind of art and poetry. Something that didn't challenge them.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Let me tell you an anecdote. I was a journalist in France for a few years during the Algerian war. Do you remember Colonel Massu? He was the chief of the Paras. He practiced terrorism and finally he publicly rescinded the tortures. He said it was useful to torture people because this gave us information and we stopped terrorism and so we saved many lives. And he said torture was applied in small doses. And in order to decide this, I experienced torture myself. This was Colonel Massu. And I remember, in a public interview, when he was retired, he started to talk about his readings. And to my big surprise, he said that he was an admirer of Baudelaire. He had met personally Jean Cocteau, and in a way they had a very good relationship. And what he said about literature, this torturer, was not so stupid, you know? No.

I think you can be even a cultivated man and be a torturer, a monster. I don't think we must mystify the dictators. The dictators at the beginning were common human beings. And they became monsters because of the power that they accumulated. And it was in a way transferred to them by very large sections of society.

Ramona Koval: But then they have a habit of putting artists and writers in gaol if they don't agree with them.

Mario Vargas Llosa: This is true. That's one of the aspects very typical of dictatorships. But at the same time we must remember also that there are artists and there are writers that have accommodated themselves very well with dictators. We must not mystify writers either.

Ramona Koval: Especially not in Edinburgh at the Book Festival. You said in your book Letters to a Young Novelist that 'the inclination for inventing beings and stories lies in rebellion, a rejection and criticism of life as it really is.' Can you tell us about your own rebellion, that led you to invent stories?

Mario Vargas Llosa: What I wanted to say is that if you consecrate your life to invent another life, probably the first reason for dislocation is a certain kind of dissatisfaction with real life, with the real world. If you were completely satisfied with the kind of life that you had, I don't think you would be pushed to invent other lives. And this, I think, is also valid for readers. I think readers who are very avid readers of literature, it's because there is a certain dissatisfaction with the real world. Something that only the fictitious world of literature can give them. That's what I mean by a rebellious attitude as the point of departure of a vocation.

The reasons, of course, for this rebellion can be very, very different. You can be a rebel because you are a very generous person and you discover that the real world is full of injustices. Or you can be a very selfish person.

Ramona Koval: What about you?

Mario Vargas Llosa: I cannot describe myself. As Borge said, when you look yourself at the mirror, you don't know how is your face. It's the others who know what kind of face you have. But I have always felt in myself this, let's say, secret reason behind my vocation. A certain rejection of the world as it is. A certain longing for a different kind of world, of life. And I think that without this feeling, or this critical attitude to the world, to life; I couldn't be a writer. And my impression is that this is more or less the case of all writers and all artists.

I don't think this is a conscious attitude necessarily. No, I think in many cases, no, you don't know why you have this vocation-you want to write, invent stories or paint. But when you scratch, I think you discover always a certain kind of incompatibility between any kind of creator. And the time, or society, or sometimes a very small problem that has destroyed completely the relationship of this person with the world.

Ramona Koval: Your book, A Fish in the Water, which is a very interesting book, is half an account of your very early life and half an account of the lead up to your decision, and your decision, to run for President of Peru. It's a very interesting thing to do, to have one chapter of memoir, really, of an autobiography, and then the other chapter of a political discussion. But it's very important to you there, to talk about the absence of your father, that you grew up first thinking your father had died and then he re-emerged. He came back to your mother, took you away from your mother's family where you'd been living, took you away and suddenly-he was your father, but he was a rival for your mother's affection.

Mario Vargas Llosa: That's right.

Ramona Koval: And this seemed very important, for you to tell that story, at the same time as telling the other story.

Mario Vargas Llosa: I think it was a very traumatic experience in my life, yes. My parents had divorced but my maternal family was very religious. They were Catholic. And they were so ashamed of a divorce, so they didn't tell me what had happened. They told me that my father had died. So I grew until I was ten years old believing that my father was dead. And when I was ten years old, one day my mother suddenly told me, 'I suppose you know your father is alive.' And I didn't know that. So that was quite a surprise! I don't think I have still recovered completely, you know, from the surprise. So that's why I start this memoir telling this episode. All because my life changed completely. Until then I had been a very spoiled child by my mother, my grandpa and my maternal family which was kind of a biblical family. And I was so spoiled that I had a very, let's say, 'heavenly' idea of the world.

And when I moved to live with my father, everything changed. He was a very authoritarian person, my father. And we hadn't any kind of relationship. We were two foreigners. So it was, I think, only there, when I went to live with my father, that I discovered the real world. I discovered the real world was not heaven, was not a paradise.

Ramona Koval: Is that when you began to think of stories?

Mario Vargas Llosa: No. I started reading and writing very, very young-well, as a game, of course. But in a way, I think, this very difficult relationship I had with my father was very important for my literary vocation. I felt very alone. One of the things that I discovered, living with my father, was solitude. Until then I had lived in this big family: uncles, aunts, cousins-it was like a biblical family. And suddenly I went to live with my father, who had, of course, taken my mother from me.

So I felt completely alone. And the big refuge was literature. At that time literature was not only entertaining, it was much more important than that. It was a place in which I could be happy. I was not happy in the real world but I was happy when I submerged myself in these fantastic worlds of adventures, of extraordinary lives. And I think at that time my vocation became very strong. On the other hand my father, who was a very practical man, a self-made man-he became very nervous when he discovered that I wrote the poem, something like that. And so he was against this. He didn't want to have a son who was a poet. That for him was horror.

So literature, for me, was a way to defy this authority. Very indirect but now I can see it very clearly. To write was a way to defend myself, to resist this authority. So in a way, my father, who was so afraid of having a writer son, was a decisive figure for my literary vocation. [laughter]

Ramona Koval: I thought so. But when you decided to defy him you then read your personal pantheon of writers, that were very important to you all your life, at that young age. At fifteen you seem to have read Hemingway and Sartre and Camus and Faulkner. And then you got a job as a crime reporter on a local newspaper. As such a young boy. But what a life-you were hanging out with journalists, drinking, going to bordellos.

[laughter]

Mario Vargas Llosa: Yes! Well, it's the only time in my life in which I was a bohemian. I had a bohemian life when I was fifteen years old. I didn't know what to do with my life, you know, because what I wanted to be was a writer, but at that time, for a Peruvian boy, it was absolutely unthinkable to say, 'I'm going to be a writer and only a writer.' I wasn't possible, it didn't exist. Writers were people who practiced literature on Sundays and holidays, but life should be concentrated on serious business.

So I said, what am I going to do? To be a lawyer, or to be a teacher? And when I was still at the school, I said, why not a journalist? And I talked to my father and he told me, well, you want to know what it is to be a journalist? He was the administrator of a news agency. And so he told me, 'In your summer holidays I shall put you in a newspaper to work.' And so it was like that that I went to work in the Chronicle, this newspaper in Lima. And during three months and a half I became a journalist. And journalism was a very bohemian kind of activity. You worked at night, and when I went to work in the crime section, of course I had to explore the underworld of Lima. It was a fantastic experience e for a young boy. It was the first real adventure similar to these literary adventures that I was so keen on, that I had in my life.

Ramona Koval: So you chose to run for President of Peru after writing so many books about politics: about revolutions and utopias and lies and sacrifices and delusions-and I wondered why you chose to do such a thing, after seemingly in your imagination, you'd imagined all the things that were possible in politics. But then you decided to put yourself in this world. And I wonder, is it because it was like being in your own novel?

Mario Vargas Llosa: Well that's what my wife says. [laughter] My wife says that I ran for President because I wanted to write a real world kind of novel. No, I don't think that was the reason. It was a very, very difficult period in Peru. We had Shining Path, terrorism. We had a populist president who had destroyed practically the Peruvian economy. We had hyper inflation. In the five years of this populist government we had two million per cent inflation. Three monetary signs disappeared. So the very fragile democracy that we had was really collapsing. It was this conflict that pushed me to participate in professional politics. Something that I never had in mind. Probably it was a big mistake. One of the important things that I learned during this campaign was that I have not the skills, the appetite, to be a successful politician.

I wouldn't do it again, certainly. But I don't regret it, because for a writer I think there is no bad experience. All experiences can be very useful, very instructive, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about politics, for example.

Ramona Koval: But you said, in your book, it was only afterwards that you made the depressing discovery that real politics 'consists almost exclusively of manoeuvres, intrigues, plots, paranoias, betrayals, a great deal of calculation, no little cynicism and every variety of con game.'

Mario Vargas Llosa: Well, you know, in a political campaign that was the case. That was what I experienced. I think that's very interesting, very instructive for a writer. For a writer, politics appears in his best face: ideas, projects, imagination of alternative society, reforms, intellectual discussions. But practical politics is something very, very different; particularly when you are fighting for power, which is a political campaign. So I discovered this other aspect in very practical terms. And this, I think, has been very useful for me. I think now I have a much more pragmatic idea of politics than before my political experience.

Ramona Koval: You nearly met the Pope...but you decided not to. Do you want to tell that story? Because you are an atheist.

Mario Vargas Llosa: I am not an atheist. I am an agnostic, which is different. An atheist is a believer and I am not a believer. I am an agnostic, that is, I am a person that declares his perplexity about transcendentalism. That's what I am. Well this was a very interesting aspect during the campaign. But it's a long story. My friends who were with me in the campaign, who were supporting me, thought that in a Catholic country like Peru to be an agnostic would be a very serious handicap. [laughter] But to my big surprise, in the second rounds my adversary was supported by the Evangelicals. So suddenly I discovered that the Catholic Church, who probably was very worried with having a president who declared himself an agnostic, decided that it was much better to have an agnostic as president than an Evangelical. [laughter] So to my very big, big, big surprise, the Catholic Church supported me very militantly in the second rounds. Without much success. Because in spite of this support, I was defeated. That gives you an idea of the kind of candidate that I was. [laughter]

Ramona Koval: Well I know that you have some people here who will want to ask you questions, so perhaps we should see whether-yes, we have a hand up here.

Audience question: Could you name one skill that you would like to have had and didn't in your attempt to become President of Peru?

Mario Vargas Llosa: One skill? You know, I think appetite. I think a successful politician has to have appetite for power. A voracious appetite. This was not my case. I think all my life I have been very mistrustful of power. I feel that power represents a threat, that power is the enemy, that power should be controlled, fiscalised, reduced. That's why I am a liberal, you know. I am a liberal in the classical sense, because liberals mistrust power, consider that power is a source of human suffering; that power should be controlled, should be reduced.

And I think during the campaign many of the mistakes-and I committed many, many mistakes-probably came because of this natural mistrust of power. I think what you have to give in a campaign is on the contrary the idea that you want power, you need power, because this is going to change everything, the lives of the people.... I never had this. And on the other hand I think I acted as an intellectual in many aspects of the campaign. That is, showing much more the doubts, the limitations than this kind of absolute truths that people want to receive from leaders. Probably the main reason for this failure was this lack of appetite for power.

Ramona Koval: Down the front here...

Audience question: I understand that you've recently returned from some time in Baghdad. I was wondering if you could give us some of your conclusions, your views.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Well, I spent twelve days only, which is not much in a country like Iraq. It is very difficult to synthesise, sum up in a few phrases the kind of apocalypses that this country is facing. But probably my most dramatic impression is not what is happening now, but what was happening before, during the bad regime. And particularly during the twenty years of Saddam Hussein. You know precisely, because I have written about dictators, I have lived in a continent where dictatorships have been the common experience, practically of all countries. I thought I knew everything about dictatorships. But in this, you discover that it's always possible to be worse, to be more cruel, more brutal, more corrupt.

Let me tell you, I think that by comparison with Trujillo, probably Saddam Hussein was worse. I think with Saddam Hussein there was less necessity to dissimilate the violence, the brutality, the crimes. All these were so explicit, so open. And this is still alive, this is still present in what is happening there. And I think it will take a long, long time to overcome these ghosts that are still part of the daily life of the Iraqi people. The Iraqis are suffering, of course, enormously. But I am totally convinced that what they are suffering now is practically nothing by comparison with what was life during those years.

You can not imagine the extremes of cruelty, of brutality; the way in which human life was totally negligible, could be destroyed. Families disappear, villages completely massacred. Suddenly, because-well, nobody knows-because Saddam Hussein received a kind of information, or he had a nightmare and he decided, suddenly, without any explanation, to massacre thousands of people. The way in which Kurd villages, or Shiite Muslims were decimated. It's really unbelievable. So this has been for me the most lasting memory of this very short journey in Iraq.

Ramona Koval: We're almost out of time, but yes, Sir, on the aisle just behind you?

Audience question: The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was given a Nobel Prize and there were a number of other South American writers, I believe one or two were Brazilians. But if my recollection is correct, there is one very interesting and important South American writer who was never given the Nobel Prize, and that's Jorge Luis Borges. I wonder if you could comment on that. Why it happened and what that might imply for South American literature.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Oh, Borges was a very great writer, without any doubt. And probably in the Spanish-speaking world the most important writer since the classics of the Golden Age. I think the revolution that Borges did in the Spanish literary prose is extremely, extremely important. And enormously influential and not only in the Spanish-speaking world. I think this is more or less recognised all over the world now, and why he didn't get the Nobel Prize-well, I think probably for political reasons. Because he has been portrayed as a reactionary and this is not totally exact, because in many periods in his life he was very courageous in defending democratic values. For example, during the Second World War, you know that the Argentine government of Peron was very sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis. And many Nazis went to Argentina because of that. And Borges was one of the writers in Argentina that was with the Allies and very clearly against Nazism since the beginning in very explicit and intelligent ways.

But in the last years of his life, probably because his rejection of Peronism, he supported the military regimes in Argentina. And he supported at the beginning a criminal military junta, the junta which was presided over by Ongania. And he accepted a decoration from Pinochet. I suppose these very stupid mistakes I would say, from a moral point of view, not only political, was a factor in this decision. But from a literary point of view, yes, I think if there was a writer that should have received the Nobel Prize it was Borges without any kind of doubt.

Ramona Koval: We've got time for just one last question. Up the back.

Audience question: One of the things that I admire about The Feast of the Goat is the way you write so sensitively from a woman's point of view. I just wanted to ask you how you did it?

Mario Vargas Llosa: Well, I like women very much-much more than men [laughter] -so I took a lot of care of Urania Cabral, who I think is a character that I love very much. It's a character that was very redeeming for me, when I had to move from Trujillo, who I hated, to Urania Cabral, with whom I could identify myself much more easily than with Trujillo. It's an invented character, Urania Cabral. But her story is not totally invented. This was one of the aspects in the Trujillo story that was so, well, how can I say, disgusting, really. When I discovered that it was true that during the visits that Trujillo did in the country he received as a present from very, very humble people young girls that were taken to him as a present because their parents felt very, very proud with the idea that the chief, you know, the Generalissimo could be interested in these girls.

That gave me the idea for Urania Cabral. And at the end, this character became very, very important as a contrast to Trujillo. It was very difficult for me to write about Trujillo, trying to not transform him into a caricature. Treating him in a very humane way, as you should do with all characters. But that's the reason why, when I had to move from Trujillo to Urania Cabral I felt really relieved and grateful.

Ramona Koval: Mario Vargas Llosa. His latest novel is The Feast of the Goat and his memoir was A Fish in the Water.