Tale of a Sacrifical Llama

By Paul Gray

To those of us who knew his work, Mario Vargas Llosa's campaign in the late 1980s for the presidency of his native Peru seemed to be a quixotic enterprise. Here was the acclaimed author of such works as The Time of the Hero and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter immersing himself in the rococo poltics of a country embattled by stratospheric inflation, pervasive corruption, severe ethnic tensions and a murderous band of Maoists known as the Shining Path. Most of Vargas Llosa's readers sighed happily when he finally lost in June 1990 to Alberto Fujimori.

Understandably, the author does not entirely share this sense of relief. A Fish in the Water (Farrar Straus Giroux; 532 pages; $25) is his bittersweet look at the nearly three years he spent in public life. It all came about, he says, "through the caprice of the wheel of fortune." At the time, he thought of his decision to campaign for the presidency as a "moral" one. "Circumstances," he writes, "placed me in a position of leadership at a critical moment in the life of my country." But that's what all politicians say. Vargas Llosa the writer is now willing to dig a bit deeper into his reasoning. "If the decadence, the impoverishment, the terrorism, and the multiple crises of Peruvian society had not made it an almost impossible challenge to govern such a country, it would never have entered my head to accept such a task." Could any motivation be more quixotic than that?

Vargas Llosa intersperses his account of his public life with chapters about his childhood and youth, beginning with a vivid and traumatic memory. One day when he was 10 years old, his mother revealed to him that his father had not died before little Mario was born, as he had always been told, but was alive and was waiting in a nearby hotel to meet his son for the first time. The boy was not amused. The reasppearance of Ernesto J. Vargas, who had abandoned his wife a few months into her pregnancy, meant that Mario was yanked out of his mother's loving, extended family, the Llosas, and forced to live in close quarters with an extremely irritable stranger.

In fiction, the cruelties experienced in childhood might be used to explain the adult who survived them, but Vargas Llosa does not attempt to make such connections here. The sections on the campaign and those on his youth run along parallel tracks, and the story of his early life trails off after he graduates from college and decides to go to Europe and write. Both stories have a matter-of-fact air about them that suggests the author is more inerested in remembering his past than in interpreting it.

In the political chapters, this tendency can lead to some pretty humdrum passages: "We held the first Freedom Day in the Hotel Crillon, in Lima, on Feburary, 6, 1988; the second, devoted to agrarian subjects, at the San Jose hacienca in Chincha on February 18; on February 26, in Arequipa..." For most readers, such moments will probably demand a greater interest in Peruvian affairs than can fairly be expected.

Still, the campaign memoir offers a convincing self-portrait of a polticial innocent sinking under a tide of democratic absurdities. Wildly popular at first, Vargas Llosa presented a coherent but harsh economic plan to his fellow citizens and rapidly became Peru's sacrifical llmama; toward the end of the campaign he endured catcalls, stone throwing and scurrilous allegations about nearly everything, including his books. "Peruvians did not vote for ideas in the elections," the author writes with considerable understatement. The moral of this often funny cautionary tale is that you should mix politics and novel writing only if you are Benjamin Disraeli.