Mario Vargas Llosa | ‘In mendacio veritas’, article by Javier Puga Llopis

I have seen Mario Vargas Llosa several times in my life, although he does not know it. He lived, like me, in Bolivia, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona, ​​and that is where our similarities end, despite the fact that my admiration for this immensely brave writer never ends.

The first was walking one Sant Jordi morning of any given year along the Paseo de Gracia. I was struck by the aristocratic bearing of someone who was not yet an aristocrat. The most exciting, during the farewell of Jorge Edwards as Chilean ambassador in Paris, in 2014, to whom Vargas paid tribute with a heartfelt speech in that very characteristic vibrato, to which Edwards, adjusting a pair of glasses over his very lively eyes, responded with a an a priori banal anecdote about an uncle of his, who nevertheless contained all the poetry that only the prose of Hispanic America is capable of exporting.

The last one was yesterday at the Institute of France, headquarters of the French Academy, a 17th century secular temple a bridge from the Fumoir, one of Masonic liturgies and founded by a prince of the Church. A building that is a wonderful contradiction.

Under the dome of the Quai de Conti, Don Mario was inaugurated yesterday, dressed in the usual uniform, embroidered with green and gold olive leaves and carrying the sword that he received days before from the “Perpetual Secretary” of the Academy – as he calls himself- , an elegant and petite lady, with a determined face and an expert in the USSR. Today she is also known for being the mother of a famous writer. Her entry into ‘l’Académie’ entitles her to immortality, even though MVLL has been immortality since long before the French realized it and published her complete work wrapped in the ermine of La Pléiade. Carmen Balcells, as a popess that she was, decreed for herself and before herself that ‘vita aeterna’ when she welcomed a young ‘Varguitas’ under her mantle of literary purple, at the end of the sixties when the itinerant circus of the Boom planted its tent and its ‘cool’ bohemia in that Barcelona that Jaime Gil de Biedma described as “the color of a dirty dove”, and whose dirt hid a cultural luster that we never saw again.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Peruvian writer, said: “I do not conceive my life more than as a chain of successive deaths & rdquor ;. Vargas Llosa’s, on the contrary, is a life that is a string of many others, each more fascinating. He was a communist and today he is a liberal. He married his aunt and then his cousin. He cataloged books and tombstones. He was a radio host. He wanted to be president against a Japanese they called ‘El Chino’. He is a commoner who was made a marquis. He bordered on statelessness and is today a universal man, a cosmopolitan who pleads guilty to what was an execrable crime in Stalin’s time. He was born Peruvian, he is Spanish, and, since yesterday, a French ‘Immortal’.

His is one of those biographies in which genius makes its way with difficulty against the elements. Where many drown on the shore, Vargas Llosa swam until he embraced luck. His life makes you think what the hell you have done with yours, and at the same time invites you not to give up trying, because life is nothing but an attempt. Everything about him is a beautiful ambivalence, a prodigious ball of fate, an endless surprise of magical surrealism.

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In 2010 he won his World Cup in Stockholm. Never has an award been so well deserved. A few years after his friend and antagonist, in front of another squad of academics, the ‘Messi’ from Arequipa was finally able to look the ‘Maradona’ from Aracataca in the eye. That supreme laurel decreed a definitive armistice in a war never declared and perpetuated the Schadenfreude of a good part of the literary left, from whom they had distanced themselves in 1971, after Fidel Castro sent Heberto Padilla to jail for thirty-eight years. They tried to send him to ostracism, but he knew how to dribble it with a wit that has brought him literary glory.

Threshold said that you had to live as a writer, and France allowed Vargas Llosa to do so in the first 50, because if this country has something, it is that it knows how to take care of its intellectuals. That is why yesterday’s ceremony was a secular consecration that closed the circle of a vocational journey that began in this same city. Vargas was invested with the sword in that republican court that is held in a round room, while he evoked the tragic adultery of La Bovary before the fraternal gaze of the one who was King and who was always a friend. Daniel Rondeau responded to his speech with a warm welcome to the first French academic to write in Spanish to that “tabernacle of the French language”, a lodge that seeks to fan the fire of the immortal against the ephemeral through literature, which does not It is, according to him, but “the truth for the lie & rdquor ;. ‘In mendacio veritas’.

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