It is not that strange that they died within few days apart, if you have to believe my (religious) intellectual friends. Vargas Llosa in his late years did rise to some sort of papal envoy of everything that a writer should be. Brilliant, opinionated, lauded everywhere. Even handsome and sharply dressed, always with a handsome woman at his side… And well, the pope… unless you are of rabidly anticlerical convictions (as my beloved is) he was a force for change, for good change, in an institution with about 2000 years of abuse and hypocrisy. So there is some sort of synchrony in both dying few days apart.
And yet.
Yet there is something shameful in the first pages of so many newspapers with their pictures and their praises. Haven’t we something, somebody better than those people? The catholic church… that abominable institution that still today defends and hide hundreds of pedophiles. The institution that managed to twist the simple message of love each other into some strange multimillionaire show of hundreds of temples loaded with riches beyond the imagination of any poor, that still today denies anti conception resources to the communities of the third world. I don’t think that you can be a fundamentally good person to have risen to the command of such monster. And if you were, as it might have been the case of Bergoglio, perhaps…. is it that hard to improve such tainted and evil institution? All our admiration for that man comes from his making some fairly simple and over-obvious statements. He considered that women might be as good spiritual guides as men, wow. Or he said, more than once, that homosexuals had a right to be happy and to live in the house of the lord. Wow. A true revolutionary.
Why is our bar so low to admire a leader?
The case of Varguitas is a bit harder, though. His words did stir what needed to be stired, not only in the literature, but in that moment in which my countries were coming out from a long sleep, and stired awake. I do not forget the shock of reading “la ciudad y los perros” in my teens. He fully belonged to that magic moment in which Cortazar, Garcia Marquez y Fuentes changed our language, which never, ever, was the same. They changed how we talked, and so we changed how we thought about ourselves. We had a place in the world, an own place. It is hard to say “latino” today and not think in something that they wrote about, by first time.
And so much more the shame of admiring Varguitas.
How could it be that a person capable of writing what he wrote, was also capable of so much hypocrisy, of an almost cruel attachment to ideal of freedom fully unconnected with the many that suffered the consequences of his lifestyle?
In our days, where the lack of intelligence has -again- arrived at the seats of power in more countries that is comfortable to think about, I believe again and again that the few intelligent persons standing have even more duties than any time before. It is beyond doubt that Vargas Llosa had a brilliant mind and a piercing pen. So much more painful then his everlasting attachment to the many causes of the conservative. In the eye of my mind I see him, the brilliant escribidor, going down in the Titanic of our society convinced that as long as anybody could say what he wanted, it is all good.
So yes, it is a dark week in which this luminaries of our time have vanished. Or perhaps it is more the proof that your -and mine- standards have been lowered to unthinkable levels.
What an opinion, my friend! Kudos to you!