Anyhow, Márquez’s restraint proves extremely effective. Littín’s story comes across with startling directness and force. Littín, transformed into a Uruguayan businessman or momio—‘a person so resistant to change that he might as well be dead … a mummy’—bumps into his mother-in-law and, later, his mother, and in both cases the ladies fail to recognize him. He rebels constantly against the requirements of security, to the fury of his resistance ‘wife’ Elena and the tolerant irritation of the Chilean underground. And he completes his film.
This short, intense book offers a succession of extraordinary filmic images. There is a story of the man who burns himself to death to save his children from the government’s torturers. There is a brief but potent account of the continuing cults of Allende and Neruda. ‘This is a shitty government, but it’s my government,’ reads a sign paraded before Allende in a demonstration. Allende applauded, and went down to shake the protester by the hand. Even now, at Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, the graffiti remember: ‘Generals: Love never dies. Allende and Neruda live. One minute of darkness will not make us blind.’ And there are, it is true, a couple of images we can recognize as classical Márquez, for example when Littín pays a surprise visit to his mother and finds that, without knowing why, she has prepared a great feast; or when Littín finds Santiago, formerly ‘a city of private sentiments’, full of highly demonstrative young lovers. ‘I thought of something I had heard not long before in Madrid: “Love blossoms in times of the plague.”’
Márquez once rashly swore never to publish a novel until Pinochet fell. Since then he has published Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and a new work, The General in his Labyrinth, about Simón Bólivar. The broken promise will no doubt have made this book feel all the sweeter; he, too, had a tail to pin on the donkey. It clearly had the desired effect. ‘On 28 November 1986, in Valparaiso,’ we are told, ‘the Chilean authorities impounded and burned 15,000 copies of this book.’
The book continues to exist, however; while Pinochet is, at long last, tottering on his plinth. To burn a book is not to destroy it. One minute of darkness will not make us blind.
1989
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
The War of the End of the World
Peru’s most important living novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, has for many years played a significant part in his country’s politics. In this respect he is like many writers of the South and unlike the great majority of his Northern colleagues. He may well, for example, be the only novelist to have been offered the post of Prime Minister, and to have turned it down—at any rate, the number of such writers must be very small—and he remains one of the most influential supporters of Peru’s President, Belaùnde Terry. For backing Belaùnde, Vargas Llosa has come in for a certain amount of criticism, for instance from left groups and writers who have objected to his critique of the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in the hills. He has in turn argued that while the world seems almost to expect the history of South America to be wholly composed of violent revolutions and repressive dictatorships, his own inclination is towards a less glamorous method of regulating human affairs—that is, some locally adapted variant of the old, flawed, battered idea of democracy, perhaps still the only idea by which the deadly cycle of coup and counter-coup can be broken. It is undeniably a persuasive point of view.
In his loudly acclaimed novel The War of the End of the World, which has arrived in English in a fine, fluent translation by Helen R. Lane, Vargas Llosa sets down with appalling and ferocious clarity his vision of the tragic consequences for ordinary people of millenarianism of whatever kind. He has written before, in the novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, about the emergence in remote rural parts of an ascetic figure who becomes a focus of resistance to a militaristic State; but that was primarily a comic novel, whereas the new book is as dark as spilled blood. And while it is most impressively got up as an historical novel—based, we are told, on a ‘real’ episode in Brazilian history—its value as a text is entirely contemporary. In an age such as ours, plagued by bloodthirsty armies and equally violent gods, an account of a fight to the finish between God and Mammon could be nothing else but contemporary, even though Vargas Llosa has placed his war in one of the most remote corners—the ‘ends’—of the world, that is, the north-eastern part of Brazil in the nineteenth century. His imaginary Messiah, the Counselor, prefigures—to offer just one recent example—the Sikh leader, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, shot dead by the Indian Army in Amritsar’s famous Golden Temple, itself a real-life version of Vargas Llosa’s fictive, Christian, Canudos.
The Counselor—Antonio Conselheiro—is a thin, awe-inspiring holy man who wanders the backlands of the province of Bahia in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, advising the peons of their spiritual obligations in clear and comprehensible language, encouraging them to help him repair the region’s many dilapidated and priestless churches, slowly gathering about himself an inner circle or band of apostles, and warning eloquently of the fearsome apocalypse that is to arrive with the millennium:
In 1900 the sources of light would be extinguished and the stars would rain down. But, before that, extraordinary things would happen … In 1896… the sea would turn into the backlands and the backlands into the sea … In 1898 hats would increase in size and heads grow smaller, and in 1899 the rivers would turn red and a new planet would circle through space. It was necessary, therefore, to be prepared.
The point of no return arrives, however, before any of these apparitions have had an opportunity to manifest themselves. Bahia, in which slavery has not been abolished for very long and which remains in the two-fisted grip of autocratic feudal landowners and extreme ignorance of the outside world, begins to hear about ominous developments. A Republic has been proclaimed, and it intends to make a census and, worse, to levy taxes. These are the last straws for the people of the backlands. Why would the Republic want everyone counted and described, if not to reimpose slavery? And, again, ‘Animal instinct, common sense and centuries of experience made the townspeople realize immediately … that the tax collectors would be greedier than the vultures and the bandits.’ The Counselor gives expression to their worst fears. He announces that ‘the Antichrist was abroad in the world; his name was Republic.’ Then he withdraws, with all who wish to follow him, to the fastness of Canudos, part of the lands of the Baron de Canabrava, the largest of the feudal landlords and chief of the Bahian Autonomist Party—which, ironically, is just as hostile to the new Republic, though for wholly profane reasons of self-interest.
In Canudos the Counselor sets about the construction and fortification of ‘Belo Monte’, a city and a church, a new Jerusalem against which the Antichrist must hurl his armies. There will be four fires, the Counselor tells his flock (which numbers, at its peak, more than 30,000 souls), and he will quench three and permit the fourth to consume them. So the four battles of the war of Canudos are prophesied in advance. What follows has the slow, sombre inevitability of a Greek tragedy—albeit one played out in a jungle—our knowledge of the end serves only to increase our pain.
Vargas Llosa’s writing has, in a way, been working up to this book throughout his remarkable career; the prose has been getting simpler, the forms clearer. It’s a long way from the structural complexities and the sometimes wilful-seeming obscurity of his very striking early novels The Time of the Hero and The Green House via the comic accessibility, even zaniness, of Captain Pantoja and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, to the much more solid, crafted, traditional virtues of the present novel. It must not be supposed, though, that this represents some kind of descent into populism; rather that Vargas Llosa would appear to have been moving, gradually, from one form of complexity towards another. Or, to be precise, from complexity of form to that of ideas. The War of the End of the World does certainly offer many of the conventional satisfactions of the long, meticulous historical novel—the re-creation of a lost world; leisurely, well-paced exposition; a sense of elb
ow-room; and of being in safe hands—but it also gives us a fictional universe bursting with intellectual argument, one whose inhabitants are perfectly willing and able to dispute matters both political and spiritual at great length and with considerable verve.
But the greatest qualities of this excellent novel are, I believe, neither its inexorable Greek progress towards the slaughter of the innocents with which it climaxes, nor its intellectual rigour. They are, rather, its refusal ever to abandon the human dimension in a story that could so easily have become grandiose; also a sense of ambiguity, which enables Vargas Llosa to keep his characters three-dimensional, and not merely the representatives of Good, or Evil, or some such abstraction; and finally, a profound awareness of the tragic irony that makes tens of thousands of ordinary women and men die fighting against the Republic that was set up, in theory, precisely to serve them and to protect them against the rapacity of their previous, feudal overlords.
Much of the story is seen from the point of view of a group of characters centred on the peasant woman Jurema. She is the wife of the tracker Rufino, feudal bondsman of the Baron de Canabrava, and when she is raped by the naïf revolutionary Galileo Gall and taken off with him by a circus troupe, Rufino is obliged by the laws of honour to follow Galileo and kill him. When the two men have in fact done each other in, Jurema arrives at Canudos in the company of a dwarf, the teller of fairy-tales who is the sole survivor of the circus troupe; and of a character known only as ‘the nearsighted journalist’ whose growth from childlike innocence to bruised maturity is at the emotional heart of the novel. Jurema is thus accompanied by representatives of both oral and written literature, and neither is able to cope with Canudos. Nobody much wants to pay for the Dwarf’s stories; and the journalist breaks his glasses and sees the great events as a series of shadows, or eventually of shards, because he pieces together a monocle from the broken lenses. An eyewitness deprived of his eyes is a sad image, and the journalist is indeed a moving figure. It is Jurema who keeps the men of words alive, partly because one of the chiefs of Canudos, the ex-bandit Pajeù, falls in love with her. Her place in the narrative is somewhat artificially centralized, it’s true; towards the end, the Baron de Canabrava, hearing the tale of the fall of Canudos from the journalist, is amazed to learn that the fellow has married Rufino’s wife (the two are among the handful of survivors of the massacre):
All these happenstances, coincidences, fortuitous encounters … [The baron] suddenly had the absurd feeling that the former maidservant of Calumbí was the only woman in the sertão, a female under whose fateful spell all the men with any sort of connection to Canudos unconsciously fell sooner or later.
It is a bit like that; but perhaps just because Jurema is such an unlikely, even banal centre, the artifice does not jar too badly. And the benefits to the novel, in terms of keeping our eyes on individual lives, are considerable.
As to ambiguity: it was a fine stroke to make the Counselor’s innermost disciples so badly flawed in so many ways. Some of them—scar-faced Pajeù, Pedrão, Abbot João—are former bandits and mass murderers; even holy Maria Quadrado, ‘Mother of Men’, turns out to be none other than the once-notorious Filicide of Salvador; and the closest disciple of all, the St Peter of this band, known as the Little Blessed One, finally (and like Peter) betrays his Christ, by breaking the solemn oath he himself made everyone take, that they would never reveal the dead Counselor’s burial place. These flaws do more than make credible characters of the apostles: they make the important point that the leaders of this bizarre uprising are in no way ‘better’ than their followers; by being in many ways ‘worse’, they do not become the repositories of morality. That role is left to the mass of the faithful as a whole.
One ambiguity is less pleasing. The Baron de Canabrava’s wife Estela goes mad when the rebels burn her beloved home, Calumbí, and for a while the falling feudalists seem almost sympathetic figures. Then the Baron quite forfeits the readers’ sympathy (and to be honest, in the case of this reader, so, nearly, does the Baron’s creator) when he rapes his wife’s servant as a way of being close to dear Estela again. ‘I always wanted to share her with you, my darling,’ he ‘stammers’, and mad Estela makes no demur. The servant, Sebastiana, is not asked to comment. It is an ugly moment in a book which, for the most part, avoids coarseness at the most brutal of times.
The political vision of The War of the End of the World is bleak, and it would be possible to take issue with that absolute bleakness. But it is hard for a writer in the late years of this savage century not to have a tragic view of life, and Mario Vargas Llosa has written a modern tragedy on the grand scale, though not, mercifully, in the grand manner. At the end of its 550 pages, two images dominate its seething portrait of death, corruption and faith. One is of the tracker Rufino, and the anarchist Galileo Gall, each the somewhat absurd servant of an idea, hacking one another slowly to death; this image would seem to crystallize Vargas Llosa’s political vision. The second is redemptive. Thirty thousand people die in Canudos, and it would be easy to think that a God who demanded such sacrifices was a God to avoid like the plague. But Vargas Llosa, with the generosity of spirit that informs the entire novel, is willing to allow the last word to someone who accepts that the catastrophe was also a kind of triumph.
The victorious soldiers, mopping-up after the levelling of Canudos, are anxious to account for the one leader whose body has not been found. An old woman asks Colonel Macedo if he wants to know what happened to Abbot João and the Colonel nods eagerly.
‘“Archangels took him up to heaven,” she says, clacking her tongue. “I saw them.”’
1984
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
For a political ‘moderate’, Mario Vargas Llosa has been making some pretty immoderate remarks lately. To call Gabriel García Márquez ‘the courtesan of Castro’ was not exactly restrained. And when Günter Grass took issue with the use of such language, he, too, was lumped in with the extreme leftists who figure more and more in Vargas Llosa’s personal demonology. That Grass the arch-gradualist, the political Snail, should seem extreme to Vargas Llosa is an indication of how far to the right the great Peruvian novelist’s notion of the centre really lies.
Nevertheless, he is a great novelist. His last two books, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The War of the End of the World, were respectively comic and tragic masterpieces. He is also a public novelist of a type I have long admired, for whom literature is a quarrel with, and about, the world. I came to Mayta entirely prepared to disagree with all those, in Spain and in Central America, who had told me, sadly, that Vargas Llosa had written his first overtly right-wing tract. Having read it, I can’t disagree with them after all. But in many ways the novel’s literary weaknesses are more disappointing than the political slant.
Mayta takes place in a Peru of the near future, in which an apocalyptic confrontation between a Cuba-backed revolution and a government propped up by US marines is imminent. Vargas Llosa has gone to great, even exaggerated lengths to seem even-handed here. Government aircraft napalm the mountain community of Chunán; the guerrillas massacre the villagers at nearby Ricrán. A kind of balance of evil is implied.
Against this violent backdrop, an anonymous narrator, a writer about whom we learn little except that he’s eminent enough to have a prison library named after him, is trying to piece together the story of a pathetic and calamitous earlier attempt at revolution, back in the 1950s, by his old schoolfellow, Alejandro Mayta. The novel moves seamlessly between investigation and flashback, sometimes in mid-sentence, our only guide being a change from present to past tense.
For at least half the novel, this is brilliantly done; the reader is never confused, and as reminiscence and re-creation mingle, Vargas Llosa’s point about the impossibility of arriving at a ‘real life’ is perfectly demonstrated by his form. All versions of Mayta’s life are suspect; the witnesses’ histories are as unreliable as history itself has become in an age when falsification is the n
orm. The narrator himself is a self-declared liar, his purpose being to invent a fictional Mayta rather than to be the biographer of the ‘real’ one (a distinction made even more complex by our knowledge that there is no real one, anyway).
Within this Citizen Kane-like structure of retrospective investigation, a further balancing act is performed. Those witnesses who slander Mayta most virulently have their own motives called into question: the Senator who says the old Trot was a government informer, on the CIA payroll, turns out to be the youth, Anatolio, whom Mayta once taught to ‘screw like a man’, and who betrayed him even though they were lovers. Contradictory descriptions of the past struggle in the text; and the narrating ‘I’, camera-like, records them neutrally.
Alejandro Mayta, the ageing Trotskyist, is not drawn without sympathy. Most marginal of men, his chance meeting with an enthusiastic second lieutenant in the army, a certain Vallejos who is secretly planning an uprising in the mountain town of Jauja, seals his fate. For Mayta, Vallejos represents his only chance of real action after a lifetime spent in impotent theoretical disputes in rented garages, and in the debilitating faction-strife of the far-left grouplets of Peru. Needless to say, their plans go hopelessly, even comically wrong, and Mayta ends up a broken, betrayed figure, selling ice-cream and pretending to forget.
Vargas Llosa possesses a formidable gift for realism of the non-magical kind, a gift that can remind one of Stendhal. When Mayta arrives in the mountains for his life’s greatest event, he is almost crippled by ‘mountain sickness’, a marvellous, ironic detail. The descriptions—of city and landscape alike—are unfailingly exact, and the machinations of the RWP(r), the minuscule, seven-man Trotskyist cell to which Mayta belongs, have the ring of truth. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta ought to be a splendid novel. It isn’t.