Thinking of Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa just weeks before he passed away at the age of 89, I was reminded of a song that has been sung since the 9th century at the Jewish Passover meal. Titled “Dahajenu” (“It Will Be Enough for Us if He Delivers Us”), it expresses gratitude for the miraculous acts experienced by the Israelites during their forty-year journey from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. Outside of its religious context, however, this song sounds more natural and enduring. It captures the collected gratitude that children feel for their parents, students for their teachers, and—truly—readers for Vargas Llosa.
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If Vargas Llosa had only given us his works of fiction, that would have been enough. Let us remember all the adventures that his novels, stories, and plays have allowed us to experience vicariously. How grateful we should be for the subtle, daring, and innovative architecture of his plots, for his unforgettable characters, and for his prose that is far from baroque, but precise, rich, and lucid.
Let's remember his novel History of Majta, an X-ray of guerrilla fanaticism in Latin America. This twisted Catholic religiosity, radicalized towards Marxism and in love with its own self-proclaimed virtue, filled the region with death, only for its followers to look back with no real conscience or memory of responsibility for the tragedies they had caused. Vargas Llosa saw it clearly - he saw through everything.
Or, let's remember War for the end of the world, his great, Tolstoyan epic that painted a canvas worthy of Brueghel or Bosch. It had it all: brutal murderers, legendary bandits, tireless fabric monitoring, sinful priests, circus dwarfs, prostitutes, blessed men and women, converted merchants. It was a story of suffering - but also of redemption.
And let's not forget Capricorn's feast, a hallucinatory and precise portrait of the prototype of the Latin American dictator, who is at the same time a window into the society and environment that applauds him, and which sometimes, in the cry of freedom, finally exorcises him like a demon. Nothing was further from Vargas Llosa than the idolatrous fascination with power, so characteristic of our culture and literature, and nothing was more remarkable in his work than his ability to translate his aversion to evil into an artistic reaction to it. Literature, in his hands, became the best revenge.
But Ljosa also saw the necessity of dreaming of a better world. That was the theme of the novel. Paradise on the other corner, his portrait of Flora Tristan - a 19th-century French-Peruvian activist, closely linked to the history of Peru, the history of art and an idea - perhaps suppressed today - that haunted Vargas Llosa, just as it haunted humanity for five hundred years: utopia.
In the same genre, the novel stands out Stormy times, which sheds light on the 1954 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Without that act of incomprehension and arrogance by the United States - reflected in characters that foreshadow Donald Trump - one cannot explain Latin America's communist turn, for which we are still paying the price today. If Vargas Llosa had only given us his novels - that would have been enough.
But he also gave us exceptional works of journalism. Archaic utopia is, for example, a painful and empathetic analysis of Peruvian indigenism; while his autobiography A fish in water simultaneously proclaiming and exorcising the personal legacy of his grueling 1990 presidential campaign - a courageous act that heralded greater freedoms on the continent. By coming to terms with himself, he allows readers to peer through the tears and pain of his childhood to his refuge and redemption - and thus to understand more deeply Ljosa's passion for literature and freedom.
If Vargas Llosa had only given us his novels and non-fiction books, that would have been enough. But he also gave us a vast, insightful opus of reportage and journalistic commentary. In the 1970s, he moved from liberation to freedom, from the rationalist and revolutionary French universe to the empirical and liberal English world.
Then came the 1980s, when Vuelta, Octavio Paz's magazine, opposed both right-wing dictatorships and left-wing revolutions. It was there, in the pages of that monthly, that Vargas Llosa fought many of his battles - including his emotional reporting on the Uchuracaj massacre of 1983, when eight Peruvian journalists were killed.
If Llosa had left us his fiction, memoirs, essays, and journalism, it would have been enough. But he also entered politics. His run for president of Peru heralded an era of freedom that seems forgotten today—though we still hope for its return.
In 2002, he founded the Freedom Movement, which brought together liberal thinkers to promote practical solutions to the region's problems. With his usual audacity, Hugo Chávez, the leftist caudillo of Venezuela, challenged Vargas Llosa to a public debate - and the latter, with his usual courage, agreed. At the last moment, Chávez, as expected, withdrew.
If our paths had never crossed during more than half a century of his literary and intellectual activity, I would still be grateful to him. But to my immense good fortune, and it is my immense fortune, our paths did cross and I had the privilege of accompanying Mario on his long and courageous liberal journey.
Sometimes I would find him with a sad expression on his face - probably a reaction to some gloomy scene in the world. But then, suddenly and naturally, a smile would shine through. In his soul lived a stoic soldier, always ready to respond to evil with imagination, irony, humor, intelligence and inexhaustible moral combativity.
It turns out that death came on the first evening of Passover. That's why I say Dahajen in your memory, dear Mario. Our Promised Land is literature - your literature.
The author is a Mexican historian, essayist, publisher and editor-in-chief of the cultural magazine Letras Libres; some of his books include Mexico: A Biography of Power (2008) and Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America (2011)
(Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025; prevod: Nela Radoičić)
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