In Honor of My Late Father, Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa

I share with the readers the essence of the funeral speech I delivered before your body on Monday, April 14, dear Varguitas, as we call you in the family, after one of your semi-autobiographical characters in one of your novels. A group of friends and relatives was present.

The main challenge I faced is that I felt I had to find a formula to allude to your immortality without mentioning the soul, since you were an agnostic and had given instructions that no religious ceremony take place. After all, we are more than matter. If the artistic creator in you survives the passing of his flesh, but that creator is an agnostic, what exactly survives besides his work?

The formula was given to me by the famous French author Victor Hugo’s funeral speech in honor of George Sand, the masculine pseudonym of a renowned female writer. After weeping over her dead body and saluting the immortal being in her, Victor Hugo explained that a figure of her stature becomes invisible in one of her forms, the flesh, but acquires visibility in another. Since the human form is a mask that hides the true face, which is “the idea,” what survives, he said, is precisely that—the idea. In your case, that would be the Vargas Llosa idea.

Every time a reader journeys through the settings of your novels—the military school, the Mangachería neighborhood in the north of Peru, the Santa María de Nieva religious mission, the Lima of the 1950s, the Brazilian northeastern region known as Sertão, the Belgian Congo of Leopold II, the Putumayo jungle, or Lima’s rundown neighborhood of Cinco Esquinas, which you visited with your grandson Leandro two weeks before passing away—what will populate his or her imagination will be the Vargas Llosa idea. Every time someone, somewhere, invokes your engagement in the great polemics of your time and your defense of individual liberty, it will be, again, the Vargas Llosa idea that he or she will summon. As will friends who remember the little or the great anecdotes they shared with you or witnessed, or my mother, Patricia, or my siblings Gonzalo and Morgana, or our six children, two apiece, when they shed a tear thinking of you.

Among the traits of your personality that I wanted to evoke that day, I chose three: the man who went after illusions from time to time without a full sense of reality; the brutally honest guy who did not always measure the effect of his unflinching honesty; finally, the nobleman prone to chivalrous gestures.

Do you know exactly when I discovered the man sometimes driven by quixotic illusions? I was eight years old and we were living on Reducto Avenue, in Lima. One day, late at night, we heard noises of assailants trying to enter the apartment. I saw you grab a slipper and resolutely go out to meet the thieves, who were probably well armed. Halfway, you stopped for a moment, calculating the odds of defeating the enemy. And, suddenly, the illusion: you held on to your slipper and continued on your way, ready for combat. When you arrived at your destination, they had already departed, thank God; I don’t know if it was because they had managed to take what they wanted or because they felt disarmed at the sight of a rival carrying the ridiculous weapon. How many times have I remembered throughout your turbulent life the moment when the image of a father in pursuit of near-suicidal illusions was instilled in me!

After the deluded spirit, came the frank, candid voice—the man who spoke his truth without foreseeing the consequences of saying it.  I was 13 years old and you and my mother had decided to send me to boarding school in England to learn to live away from the family yoke and broaden my horizons. I did not yet speak English, and I was assailed, weeks before, by the fear that, unable to communicate with anyone, I would lose the gift of speech. I was haunted by the fear of dumbness. The first day of school, you were holding my hand and I dared to ask you, a bit terrified: “Dad, do you think that if someone stops speaking for a long time, he can become mute forever?” You left me frozen when you answered: “Most probably yes, Alvarín.” (Alvarín was the tender diminutive version of my first name he liked to use.) Any other father would have dispelled the child’s fears quickly; you did not think of that, but answered me with adult frankness. The image of the straight-shooting father was instilled in me forever. How many times have I remembered that day, seeing you stir trouble around the world by telling uncomfortable truths—literary, political, personal—in public!

Then came the nobleman. During a forgettable electoral campaign after the fall of an authoritarian regime that we had both fought against in Peru, we had a disagreement. The favorite candidate and the hero of the moment, whom I, along with other independents, had actively supported, was disappointing me by leaps and bounds. I called you to tell you that I would break with him. (You were based overseas.) You got very angry: “You are going to harm the liberal democratic cause!” I decided, in spite of everything, to step aside, which caused, in effect, somewhat of a scandal. You, Varguitas, came out publicly to disavow me. I was hurt. We drifted apart for a few months. Several years later, when nobody remembered that episode and the former president was in prison, I was surprised, when I opened El País, the Spanish daily where you wrote a biweekly commentary, to find a column in which you publicly apologized to me. I was moved to the bone. The idea of the “hidalgo” father, the man moved by a sense of the noble, stuck with me forever.

Out there I see that many people around the world—from the United States to Iran, from Spain to India, from Lebanon to Peru—are bidding farewell to the creator of parallel realities made of words, to the last “classical” novelist, to the civic leader who guided many towards the ideas of liberty and freedom. But here, in the intimacy of the family, what we say goodbye to is the man who worked every day with the fanatical discipline of a soldier or an elite athlete, the guy who hated olives more than dictators, the one-time candidate who locked himself in a bathroom for five minutes to read Góngora, the Spanish poet, in the midst of an urgent electoral campaign in his native country, the carnivore and the gourmand, the uncured cinephile, the guide who asked us to read for two hours at his side when we were kids (to see if habit engendered taste, and it did), the childish adventurer, the guy who became euphoric when his soccer team scored goals—the same euphoria with which two days before you died, when I read “Le Bateau ivre,” famous French poet Rambaud’s masterpiece, in your ear, you said to me in French, your eyes shining with emotion: “Je me souvenais du rythme, pas des mots.” (“I remembered the rhythm, not the words.”)

My dialogue with you began some 46 years ago, when I was 12 or 13. A few days ago, I was traveling in the confines of the ancient Achaemenid Empire when I received a call that made me rush around the world to join you in Lima. I was traveling partly to conclude that dialogue forever. You greeted me with a laugh that meant: you are wrong, this dialogue will continue, but in another form. (Well, I tell you, since the dialogue continues, yours, like all dramas, has a tragicomic touch: while you were in your death throes and after you died and my mourning began, my partner, whom you met, had no better idea than to return to her country forever without a farewell conversation or a definitive explanation).

Peru and Latin America have lost one of their best men. Literature, that homeland without borders, has lost one of its great creators. My sister, Morgana, who fought like a lioness these last few months; my brother, Gonzalo, who traveled so many times from Syria, where he leads the UNHCR office, to see you in Lima; our mother, Patricia, that woman whom I dare not call a saint for fear of being too economical with my words, and I, together with our children, have lost a piece of us (and I have lost my best friend). But, as Renoir, the 19th-century artist, is said to have told his colleague Matisse when he saw him painting despite the traumatic rheumatism he was suffering from: “Pain passes, beauty remains”.

Farewell, dear Varguitas.