VARGAS LLOSA VISITS HIS ANIMAL

In retrospect Garcia’s explosion of temper seems justified, for the rally in San Martin Plaza launched Vargas Llosa’s meteoric political career as leader of Movimiento Libertad (the Freedom Movement) and front-running candidate for the Peruvian presidency. Nearly three years later, in April 1990, Vargas Llosa won a narrow plurality in the initial round of the presidential election. But his political odyssey was not fated to end in triumph. In June he lost the runoff election to an obscure Japanese-Peruvian agronomist, Professor Alberto Fujimori. In the aftermath of his unsuccessful campaign (and Fujimori’s subsequent coup d’etat in 1992), Vargas Llosa has returned to the vocation that had already made him, on that critical night in 1987, one of the most famous cultural figures in Latin America. Although his vision of a truly democratic Peru remains unrealized, and his native country has fallen victim yet again to authoritarian rule, the recent publication of Vargas Llosa’s latest novel, Death in the Andes (translated by Edith Grossman; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 279 pages, $ 24), testifies to the undiminished artistic powers of one of the most accomplished writers in the world.

Although the germinal idea for his new novel occurred to Vargas Llosa before he entered politics in 1987, the subsequent frustration of his political hopes for a liberal democratic Peru doubtless contributed to the pessimism of Death in the Andes. Originally published in Barcelona in 1993 as Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa’s latest work is set in the remote Andean mining community of Naccos, whose dwindling number of dispirited inhabitants suffer deplorable economic conditions, relentless natural disasters, and the depredations of the Maoist guerrilla army, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), whose terrorist attacks have turned the region into a showcase of atrocities.

Corporal Lituma, a member of the civil guard, and his adjutant, Tomas Carreno, who have been quixotically posted to this alien locale to protect the miners, investigate the mysterious disappearance of three inhabitants of the camp. In the evenings that the two spend together during their investigation, Carreno recounts his own turbulent romance with a prostitute, Mercedes Trelles, the mistress of a drug lord named “Hog.” Carreno tells how he was hired as a bodyguard by the drug lord, whom he subsequently assassinated when the latter viciously beat the beautiful Mercedes during a night of orgiastic sadomasochism.

The story of the eventful flight of Tomas and Mercedes and of their tormented passion provides a counterpoint to the grim tale of savagery, lust, and religious devotion Lituma and Carreno bring to light in Naccos. These interwoven narratives of primal passion, brutal instinct, violent fanaticism, and atavistic barbarity ultimately serve as an emblem of a country so rooted in the myths and beliefs of the past that it is unable, in the words of the former presidential candidate, “to become a part of history.”

An alter ego who has often appeared in Vargas Llosa’s fiction and drama, Lituma represents the frustrated spirit of enlightenment, a figure whose heroic striving to know the truth leads to an understanding, but never an amelioration, of the evils that beset his nation. While Naccos is intended to be an outpost of progress, a site where the material development of an impoverished nation might be pursued, what Liturea discovers is a lost world ruled by tellurian powers, a primitive land still under the sway of ancient and cruel gods, the apus, or spirits of the mountains, who demand nothing less than the flesh and blood of their human worshippers.

At a time when North American scholars debate the end of history, Lituma and Carreno intrude upon a world in which the mountain folk of the Andes still believe in the existence of pishtacos (demons who suck the fat from their living human victims), mukis (devils who inhabit the mines and prey on the workers), witches, sorcerers, spiritchasers. Under the demonic tutelage of Dionisio, the local cantina owner in Naccos, and his fortunetelling spouse, Adriana, Lituma and Carreno ultimately learn what it means for the sertuchos, the local inhabitants, to commune with the spirits of the Andes, or in the ominous phrase of Dionisio to “pay a visit to their animal.” Lest the modern reader dismiss the orgiastic violence of the Andes as some Third World aberration, Vargas Llosa slyly suggests that these shocking acts are only reenactments of the most venerated foundational myths and practices of Western civilization.

In the Andes, modern and ancient terror cohabit in a perpetual cycle of bloodshed and murder. In the course of his investigation, Liturea encounters Paul Stirmsson, a scholar of ancient Andean civilizations who has spent thirty years studying and traveling in the Cordillera. The Danish professor describes the religious practices of the Huancas and Chancas, preIncan peoples whose human sacrifices involved spectacular acts of torture, dismemberment, and cannibalism and whose civilization was annihilated by the no less sanguinary Incas.

The professor casts the recent terrorism of the Sendero Luminoso (and the equally bloody counterterrorism of the army) in an unusually broad and telling historical context. Underlying the dynamiting of bridges, power plants, and roads; the wholesale destruction of crops and livestock; the assassination of local officials, police officers, and soldiers; and the murder of foreign tourists, aid workers, farmers, miners, and itinerant scholars, lies an ideological faith no less absolute and violent for being based on the worship of Mao or Abimael Guzman (the leader of Sendero Luminoso, finally apprehended in 1992) rather than on that of the ancient gods of the Huancas, Chancas, or Incas. When the senderistas make it clear that they will execute a group of idealistic environmentalists whom they have captured in the Andes, in the same implacable manner that they have massacred a docile herd of vicufias and stoned to death a pair of young French tourists, one of their victims laments: “They hear, but they don’t listen, and they don’t want to understand what you say to them. They’re from another planet.” The powers that tyrannize the Andean highlands rise and fall; the religion of violence and human sacrifice endures. Only the joylessness of the Sendero Luminoso distinguishes them from their pre-Columbian predecessors.

Vargas Llosa’s latest novel will provide further evidence (were any needed) of his definitive conversion from radical Marxism to what he calls in his 1993 political memoir, A Fish in the Water, “radical liberalism.” But the appeal of Death in the Andes — as of Vargas Llosa’s many extraordinary novels published in the 1980s, including The War of the End of the World (1981), The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), and The Storyteller (1989) — lies in its uncompromising representation of liberal democratic ideals as neither irresistible nor immutable. In Vargas Llosa’s view, liberal democracy is the product of human invention and painstaking cultivation, which must be ardently defended against enemies ancient and modern if it is to survive and flourish. In fact, in his fiction of the last decade and a half, Vargas Llosa has been more interested in exploring those archaic worlds lost to enlightened liberalism than societies that have seen the triumph of what Vargas Llosa, echoing Hayek, calls “legality, freedom, and property.” Whether set in the Brazilian backlands, the remote reaches of the Andean highlands, or the most primitive backwaters of Amazonia, Vargas Llosa’s recent fiction has opened up those places of darkness, those “blank spaces” on the map, where the power of enlightened reason has faltered or failed.

Vargas Llosa’s recent novels display surprising continuities with his early fiction. Both as a man of the Left and of the Right, Vargas Llosa has been a champion of the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden, and as a novelist he has endeavored to expose the sources of political evil and economic exploitation. What has changed over nearly four decades is his understanding of the causes of human suffering and the nature of political enlightenment. Where once he looked to socialism and revolutionary Marxism as standard- bearers of political progress, Vargas Llosa has come to see in the politics of the Left a seductive relapse into pre-enlightened ways of life, a paradoxically reactionary return to the irrational and authoritarian political institutions and economic practices of the past.

Not that Vargas Llosa’s early and widely acclaimed fiction — The Time of the Hero (1962), The Green House (1965), The Cubs (1967), and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) — was the stuff of some latterday Candide who wandered the New World an unreconstructed naif. By the time he was sixteen, a stint as a crime reporter in Lima had provided Vargas Llosa with firsthand knowledge of the rapacious underworld of prostitutes, hack writers, frustrated artists, political bosses, hired thugs, corrupt police officials, and petty criminals that became a favorite subject of his early fiction. Though he spent his childhood and adolescence in the privileged enclaves of Bolivian and Peruvian society, he early acquired a profound sympathy for los de abajo — those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Inspired in his teens by the writings of Sartre, Vargas Llosa became a member of the underground Peruvian Communist party, Cahuide, during his first year at San Marcos University in Lima. There he headed Marxist reading groups, passed out political leaflets, wrote for a Communist weekly, organized a student strike, inveighed against the Odria dictatorship of the early 1950s, and on one memorable occasion was allowed a personal interview with the dreaded head of state security, Esparza Zafiartu.

Though the initial participation of “Comrade Alberto” (Vargas Llosa’s pseudonym in the party) was relatively short-lived, his enthusiasm for Marxism was rekindled in the early sixties by the triumph of Castro in Cuba. In those heady days following Che Guevara’s confident declaration that the advent of “the new man” of Latin American communism was at hand, Vargas Llosa once more took up the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and their progeny, Mao, Gramsci, Lukacs, Mariategui, and Althusser. During the decade-long lovefest between Castro and the New World intellectual and artistic community, Vargas Llosa along with a group of prodigiously talented Latin American writers that included Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, and Jose Donoso ignited what became known as “El Boom,” an explosion of Latin American literary activity in the 1960s that had worldwide cultural repercussions. The group was regularly feted by the new caudillo in Havana.

Vargas Llosa reached an early pinnacle in his career with the publication in 1969 of Conversation in the Cathedral, a labyrinthine epic novel about Peruvian political corruption, economic exploitation, and social decay under the Odrla dictatorship that was greeted as his magnum opus by fellow critics and writers on the Left. Vargas Llosa’s novels of the 1960s were characterized by a masterly deployment of modernist narrative strategies borrowed from Joyce, Dos Passos, Conrad, and especially Faulkner; an early command of dialect and dialogue; an exuberance of knotty plots and subplots; and a rich offering of fully realized characters drawn from the entire spectrum of contemporary Latin American society.

But what made Vargas Llosa such a darling of the Left during the decade was the socially engaged and politically subversive quality of his works. Unlike the no less committed Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa eschewed the magical realism that made One Hundred Years of Solitude an international sensation. His novels were (and by and large still are) characterized by an uncompromising realism that harks back to the great nineteenth-century novels of Scott, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. Then as now, Vargas Llosa rejected the mystification of a social reality that was already suffering from an over- abundance of myths and fantasies and that desperately required a bracing measure of critical self-examination.

Within the confines of this disciplined realism, Vargas Llosa displayed a gift for political critique and social analysis that never descended into diatribe or didacticism. His early novels were at once an answer to and vindication of the searching criticism of literary modernism leveled by the great Hungarian-Marxist critic, Georg Lukacs. Vargas Llosa’s novels exhibited the consummate technical virtuosity of modernism without sacrificing that crucial quality upon which Lukfics insisted the real worth of the novel depends: the virtue of representing clearly and accurately the “totality” of objective social relationships.

Vargas Llosa’s disenchantment with the Left was gradual. He has tended to identify the 1971 arrest, imprisonment, and show trial of the dissident Cuban poet Herberto Padilla as a turning point in his political education. Vargas Llosa’s public protest against what he termed Castro’s repressive action and his demand that Padilla be released were the first public indications of his shifting political affiliations. His comic novels of the 1970s, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), were, perhaps inaccurately, seen by critics as signaling a retreat on the part of the author from his political engagement. In retrospect the novels of the 1970s marked not a turn to apolitical subject matter, mere indulgence in autobiography and sexual comedy, but rather a sweeping reconceptualization of the causes of individual human suffering, which had always been the focus of Vargas Llosa’s imaginative work. While the formal techniques and generic models of his writing continued to be taken in equal measure from the realistic novels of the nineteenth century and the modernist fiction of the twentieth, by the 1980s Vargas Llosa was drawing his political and intellectual sustenance from the likes of Aron, Popper, Hayek, Von Mises, Friedman, and Nozick.

But despite Vargas Llosa’s increasingly public (and within academic and artistic circles much criticized) shift in political affiliation, the sympathetic hero of his novels remained, as he does to this day, the little guy who suffers the injustices of a corrupt and barbaric political system seemingly incapable of progressive change. The protagonists of Vargas Llosa’s recent fiction — the myopic journalist of The War of the End of the World, the Trotskyite manque Alejandro Mayta, Liturea — are figures who discern the illiberal and oppressive character of their social environment but are finally powerless to transform it. At best, they may, momentarily, escape from its grasp.

It was to the exploited and disaffected members of Peruvian society, those who, without theoretical deliberation, sought out the interstices of state power where they assumed personal responsibility for themselves and their families, the small-time entrepreneurs and farmers in the informal economy, that Vargas Llosa hoped to appeal in his presidential campaign. His inability to mobilize this enormous sector of informales and parceleros on behalf of liberal democratic reform was, by Vargas Llosa’s own admission, the great tragedy of his brief political career.

In A Fish in the Water, Vargas Llosa recounts his increasing frustration with the way in which a campaign that was launched as a contest of political ideas became a savage struggle characterized by appeals to myths, images, and brutal instincts. Having endeavored to present an enlightened vision of democratic liberalism, he found himself in the midst of a violent and irrational election that fed off racism, xenophobia, religious strife, and class hatred. Reluctantly taking the advice of his political consultant, Mark Malloch Brown, Vargas Llosa agreed late in the campaign to shed his bodyguards and mingle with his supporters at mass rallies: They “would be able to approach me,” he said, “shake hands with me, touch me and embrace me, and also, at times, tear off bits of my clothes or push me to the ground and mangle me if they felt like it.” Whether the assembled were adulatory or enraged, what most struck the candidate was the monstrous and inhuman aspect of the crowd. At a rally in one of the poorest regions of Peru, Vargas Llosa confronted a mob with his message of liberal democratic reform — a message carefully tailored to them in theory, but in fact utterly alien and unwelcome:

Armed with sticks and stones and all sorts of weapons to bruise and batter, an infuriated horde of men and women came to meet me, their faces distorted by hatred, who appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings and animals were indistinguishable. . . . They hurled themselves on the caravan of vehicles as though fighting to save their lives or seeking to immolate themselves, with a rashness and a savagery that said everything about the almost inconceivable levels of deterioration to which life for millions of Peruvians had sunk.

In that grim and unequal confrontation between the solitary representative of enlightened reason and the violent atavistic crowd, the tragedies of Vargas Llosa’s greatest novels are enacted.

Michael Valdez Moses is associate professor of English at Duke University and the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture.