The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman (Faber and Faber, £20)Vargas Llosa featured on our world thinkers shortlist this year
Mario Vargas Llosa’s concern with the shifting politics of his native Peru has generated novels about militarism, apocalyptic rebellion, patriarchy and dictatorship. He has been absent for long periods from his native country: he spent 16 years in Europe in his twenties and thirties and later divided his time between Paris, Madrid, London and Lima, with spells in the United States. He is as much at home in Europe as in Latin America. Nevertheless, Peru has given him his major themes and characters. Vargas Llosa is now 78 years old and the era of Latin American dictatorships is over—though authoritarianism and patriarchy persist in different guises. In The Discreet Hero, his most recent novel and a bestseller in Spanish, Vargas Llosa illuminates the more subtle discontents and understated violence that can be inflicted on a society in an apparently benign period of rapid economic growth and stable politics. Vargas Llosa began his career with a bang in 1963, when he was 26 years old. His first novel, The Time of the Hero, won a major prize and had the distinction of being ceremonially burned by a military academy. That novel was also a symbolic act of parricide. Mario’s father, Ernesto Vargas, abandoned his pregnant wife after five months of marriage. Mario grew up with his mother in Peru and Bolivia, where his grandfather served as consul in Cochabamba. When Mario was 10, his father reappeared and the reconstituted family settled in Lima. It was not a welcome turn of events for young Mario. Vargas senior was a violent man who regarded his son’s love of literature as a strong indication of homosexuality. He sent the boy to army cadet school at the age of 14, the experience that was to produce his debut novel. The Time of the Hero chronicles the brutality of army life and set its young author on the road to one of the most successful literary careers in Latin America—at a time when a dazzling generation of writers had become the voice of a subcontinent suffering dark political times. Vargas Llosa’s life has been as colourful as his novels. He married first his aunt, whom he fictionalised in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. (She wrote her own literary riposte.) He later married his cousin, Patricia, and in 1976 slugged Gabriel García Márquez, over the Colombian writer’s inappropriate attentions towards her. More than 30 novels, plays and works of non-fiction, a failed presidential bid in 1990, a Nobel Prize for literature in 2010 and numerous newspaper columns and essays later, the author and the political mood have changed. Vargas Llosa has travelled from the far left to the Thatcherite right, from sympathy with the Cuban revolution to belief in the market economy. At the same time, the political order across South America has largely returned to constitutionalism and political transitions now rely routinely on the ballot rather than the bullet. In Peru, democracy has been consolidated: the former Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán is in the same Peruvian jail as the sinister former intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, and Alberto Fujimori, the disgraced politician who beat Vargas Llosa to the presidency in 1990. The economy is riding high. A relaxation of sexual morals has diminished the role of the brothel—once a central feature of Peruvian life—and sudden if brittle prosperity has dramatically expanded the place of the casino. Vargas Llosa’s themes remain familiar: sex, politics, the struggle to live in dignity and freedom, inter-generational conflict and Peru’s rigid social mores, often illustrated by the unbridgeable social divide between “white” society (blanco) and “native” or cholo citizens. The Discreet Hero, rendered into English by Vargas Llosa’s long-serving translator Edith Grossman, is set in tropical Piura in northern Peru, a city no longer mired in economic stagnation and political authoritarianism. In Piura, old districts have been torn down to be replaced with paved streets; air-conditioned shopping centres have sprung up and leisured groups of young people linger over cups of coffee. But with prosperity have come new problems—rising crime, social disruption and a sense of unease at the loss of traditional values, told, in this novel, through three sets of father-son relationships. The clash of generations in Vargas Llosa’s novels once took the form of a filial rebellion that set up radical politics against authoritarian conservatism. In his mature years, though, it appears more as a nostalgic hymn to the virtue and integrity of the older generation, which has been betrayed by the money-obsessed young. The novel interweaves the story of Don Felícito Yanaqué, the boss of the Narihualá transport company, and his two sons; that of Ismael Carrera, the successful but now elderly boss of a Lima insurance company and his twin sons; and that of Ismail’s long-serving office manager Rigoberto, now on the brink of retirement, his wife Lucrecia and his adolescent son Fonchito. Followers of Vargas Llosa’s literary career will recognise Don Rigoberto, Lucrecia and Fonchito from an earlier novel, along with Sergeant Lituma, Vargas Llosa’s Everyman, here playing a police sergeant in Piura. Lituma has cropped up in at least seven Vargas Llosa novels since his first appearance in Los Jefes in 1958, a collection of short stories. This iteration of the character is explicitly linked to the one in Los Jefes. Ismael is a wealthy widower, whose profligate twin sons don’t realise that their father has heard them discuss their imminent inheritance across what they had mistakenly assumed to be their father’s deathbed. Don Ismael scandalises Piura’s high society, and enrages his offspring, by marrying Armida, his housekeeper of many years’ standing, in a ceremony witnessed only by his faithful black driver, Narciso, and Don Rigoberto. Don Felícito, the discreet hero of the title, is the unhappy husband of Gertrudis, a stoic chola whom he married after being accused of impregnating her during a drunken one night stand. The son’s blonde hair and tall physique troubles Felícito, who consoles himself with a much younger mistress called Mabel. As the novel opens, Don Felícito’s orderly routine of work and mistress-visiting is disturbed by the arrival of an extortion letter, marked with a hand-drawn image of a spider. The sender demands payment of $500 a month to ensure that nothing unpleasant happens to Don Felícito’s business or his family. Don Felicito is a self-made entrepreneur who owes much to the sacrifices of his impoverished father. Remembering his dying words—“Never let anyone walk all over you, son”—he refuses to pay and heads instead for the local police station. There he encounters Sergeant Lituma, who regards a case of attempted extortion as a mark of Piura’s economic progress. Don Felícito’s refusal to give in to his unknown extortionist, even in the face of the arson, makes him a hero in a town in which compliance with such demands is the unwritten rule. As the drama unfolds, however, Don Felícito’s certainties begin to unravel. The housekeeper, Armida, meanwhile, whose fortunes are transformed by her unexpected marriage, grows into a dignified figure who behaves with generosity and discretion as scandals break about her. Vargas Llosa’s literary landscape is populated with sexy middle-aged women, mystics and characters who could have stepped out of one of Latin America’s eccentric soap operas. The Discreet Hero’s proliferating plot strands, which come eventually to a neat conclusion, also recall soap opera technique. Sub-plots packed into these pages include a sexually frustrated secretary and a policeman obsessed with female backsides; the enigma of Edilberto Torres, a troubling figure who appears to Rigoberto’s adolescent son, Fonchito, and who may or may not exist; and the sexual fantasies of Rigoberto and Lucrecia. Rigoberto and Lucrecia are the erotic couple in his 1999 novel, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, in which the hero compensates for his dull insurance office life with sexual fantasies. There is a re-run of this action in The Discreet Hero. It is hard to avoid speculating that the author had some left over passages he didn’t want to waste. The Discreet Hero may not be Vargas Llosa’s best novel—or the best translated. Grossman’s rendering of Piura slang as US gangster speak can be jarring. But it is an enjoyable romp that sits well in a long line of politically and socially engaged novels that have challenged Peruvian society during the five decades of Vargas Llosa’s career. The enemy in The Discreet Hero is no longer the dictator’s secret state but criminals who hide in the shadows. The cities might have been done up, but everything, including politics, loyalty, love and violence, is up for sale. Only the upright citizen stands in defence of integrity and justice.
