A Magical Realist and His Reality (Page 2)

Both writers spent their crucial first years as small boys under the roof of an adoring grandfather, the patriarch of the family--a civil war veteran in Colombia, a planter and prefect in Bolivia/Peru. Their fathers, who had similar jobs (a telegraph operator, a radio operator) and made similar marriages (against in-law resistance, above their station), were absent: blank positions in the emotional structures of childhood, in which even mothers played a secondary role. Sexual initiation came early, in brothels about which each writes with wry affection. Later, each married a home-town girl. As adolescents, both were sent against their will to boarding schools by their fathers. Each was happily formed in the provinces, and experienced arrival in the capital as a misfortune.

At university, both plunged into a side-life of journalism and nocturnal carousal. Each turned a hand to radio soap operas, even inspired by the same tear-jerker--Felix B. Caignet's The Right to Be Born (no anachronistic pro-life connotations). In both cases, the great literary discovery of their youth was Faulkner, whose novels they report marking them more deeply than any other. Each ends his memoir of those years at the same fateful point, as the writer--having just learned something of the unknown interior of the land (El Chocó, Amazonas)--leaves his native country for Europe, never to fix his residence there again.

A set of parallels like these is an invitation to some future Plutarch of Latin American letters. Yet what they serve to throw into relief are finally the contrasts between the two novelists, and their memoirs. For all the similarities in their family constellations, Vargas Llosa came--on his mother's side--from a more privileged social background, a clan of the Arequipa elite that produced Peru's first postwar president, Bustamante y Rivero. Class and color situated him higher up the social scale, in what was also a more rigidly racist society, than a mestizo boy would be in Colombia. Formal education, too, separated them. García Márquez explains how thoroughly disaffected he was from his studies at university, where his father had insisted he take law, and he eventually dropped out. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, had a brilliant student cursus, becoming an assistant to a leading local historian in Lima before even graduating. The university was a central experience for him, whereas it meant nothing to García Márquez. That difference explains why Vargas Llosa got to Europe so much earlier in his career, with a scholarship to Madrid. So, too, once in Europe, he has never really left it, living essentially in Paris, London and Madrid, with trips back to Lima; while as a journalist García Márquez soon returned to Latin America, and would ultimately settle in Mexico.

These divergent trajectories have their atmospheric correlates in the work of each. In their lifetimes, the histories of their two countries--measured in terms of slaughter, repression, frustration, corruption--could hardly have been grimmer, and these of course find expression in their novels. But García Márquez's depictions of his homeland, even at its worst, are infused with a lyrical warmth, an immutable love, that has no counterpart in Vargas Llosa's world, where the writer's relationship to the land of his origins is always tense and ambiguous. Part of the reason for this difference can be found in their individual situations. For if the configuration of the two families from which they came was strikingly similar, their emotional voltage was quite opposite.

García Márquez's mother, of whom he paints a loving portrait, was clearly a woman of great strength of character, capable of managing her spirited, if wayward, husband and eleven children, in penury or precarious prosperity alike. Vargas Llosa's father, abandoning his spouse without a word when she was five months pregnant, and appearing out of the blue ten years later to repossess her and shanghai him, was by contrast a traumatic nightmare: feared by his wife and hated by his son. Showing no attachment to his native land, he eventually immigrated to the United States, dying a janitor in Pasadena.

Even the melodramas of the early sexual experience of the two writers, set pieces of Latin honor and outrage, reflected this contrast. When Vargas Llosa married his aunt--in this semi-deracinated family, not coincidentally a Bolivian--his father, after brandishing a revolver, denounced him to the police in Lima and threatened to kill him with five bullets like a rabid dog. García Márquez, caught in flagrante with the black wife of a policeman in the backlands, was faced with a pistol too, and the words "cheating in bed is settled with lead." But the affronted sergeant let the terrified boy off with a humiliation, as thanks for a medical service from his father, and when last seen is drinking with him. The two scenes, each set pieces of a theatrical machismo, speak in their way of differing societies. The poetry and humanity of the Colombian episode capture the general spirit of Living to Tell the Tale and the ties of its author with the community in which he grew up, whereas the title of A Fish in the Water inverts the story it actually tells. This is more accurately conveyed by its first draft, released as A Fish Out of Water, a reversal that is not the least oddity of Vargas Llosa's memoir as a whole. Composed at a moment of acute political disappointment, and inevitably somewhat discolored by it, the book is nevertheless shot through with a detestation of much in Peruvian life that clearly expresses feelings of long standing.

The literary consequences of this difference are not what might be expected. The--now shopworn--label of "magical realism" is customarily applied to García Márquez's novels. It has never fitted Vargas Llosa, who disavows the adjective. "I have an invincible weakness for so-called realism," he remarks in A Fish in the Water. One of the most significant contrasts between their fiction follows from--or perhaps dictates--these distinct options. The bulk of Vargas Llosa's work is set in the Peruvian present, contemporary with his own experience. The principal exceptions are displacements, not just of time but of space--the Brazil of The War of the End of the World, or the France and South Seas of The Way to Paradise. Within his own country, he has been unwaveringly à la page. None of García Márquez's major novels, on the other hand, represent the epoch in which he himself became a writer. Macondo vanishes in the Great Depression. The patriarch belongs to the rustic world of Juan Vicente Gomez, who ruled Venezuela from 1908 to 1935. The time of cholera is Victorian. The general expires as the Restoration ends. Modernity is allergic to magic: García Márquez's powers have always needed a recession into the past to be exercised with full freedom.

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