Today, Mario Vargas Llosa arrived at the unionist demonstration in Barcelona. The Nobel prize winner is a well-known writer who lived in the Catalan capital during the final years of the Franco regime, as the protégé of Carme Balcells, Spanish-language literary agent and lover of Spanish culture who was fascinated by the Cuban revolution and by the sumptuous Latin American literature which brought her both good fortune and prosperity. Here in Barcelona, Vargas was very well received and celebrated. He was a friend of my mentor Martí de Riquer, with whom he co-wrote El combate imaginario. Las cartas de batalla de Joanot Martotell in 1972. He spent a lot of time with Carlos Barral, with Jaime Gil de Biedma and talked with Gabriel Ferrater, without undergoing any awakening of an interest in Catalan culture. In this regard, he was different from the fellow writer who was his neighbour in those days, Gabriel García Márquez, who could read in Catalan and who, guided by Ramon Vinyes, became a Catalanist and a fan of Mercè Rodoreda. The Peruvian writer, however, stayed on the edges of everything that was not Spain and Spanish literature. Even though he lived very close to J.V. Foix, Mario Vargas Llosa never wanted to get to know the Catalan writer, living legend of a fascinating Barcelona, who had been cosmopolitan, ultra-modern, sophisticated and Catalan, a friend of García Lorca, of Joan Miró and of Salvador Dalí.
These two great writers had two very different attitudes. Emigration always produces the two types of emigrants that García Márquez and Vargas Llosa represented: on the one hand, those that plunge into the culture of their host country as an experience in human richness and intellectual warmth, who have no fear of external influences and seek them out; and then there are those others, those who want to keep themselves pure like maidens in the choir, who feel horror, authentic repugnance for cultures that are minoritized, local, aboriginal. They see these cultures as unhappy and primitive phenomena, horrible, typical of people who are subhuman, underdeveloped, of peasants without culture, almost of savages, perhaps like the Catalans from outside Barcelona or the indigenous people of Peru. Mario Vargas Llosa never wanted to stop being a boy from a good home, caught up in braggart prejudices learned in a military academy, coming from a high society of white people, proud, arrogant and racist. His endogamy is complete and systematic, close to incestuous. Until his later years, he never had a serious relationship with any woman that was not part of his own family. He may have lived in London or in the United States, in Paris or in Madrid, but for all that, it cannot be said that Vargas Llosa likes 'other' people, people who are strange or different, those who are not privileged, rich and sophisticated. And in this regard I am not thinking of his current partner but rather Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo y Peralta Ramos, twelfth Marquess of Casa Fuerte, related on her father's side to the second duke of Alba, not precisely a pacifist, and with one of the colonizers of Argentina on his mother's side. This aristocratic lady, former Partido Popular parliamentarian, has convinced Mario Vargas Llosa that today he is in Barcelona to defend Spain. The marquess is a leader of the 'Free and Equal' platform, a group defending the Spanish constitution which, as you well can understand, has a quite a slanted idea about what freedom and equality actually consist of. But that doesn't perturb them. Naturally they have a very favourable view of Spain's colonialism in Latin America, defending a world that is not our world but which, they have decided, we must be very pleased to share. And they come to introduce themselves as personalities who are ideal, prestigious, worthy of emulation and admiration. As the best sort of people. I don't see any relationship between admiring The Feast of the Goat, which I love, and being in favour of the colonization of Catalonia. Nor between reading The War of the End of the World with great enjoyment and sharing the political ideas of Mario Vargas Llosa. When he stood as a candidate for the presidency of Peru he lost the elections because he was seen as snobbish, posh, rigid and supremacist. Vargas appeals to me so much, and convinces me so little. (To be continued)