I must tell you, with all my affection, to Mary Married, that this meeting you had with Mario Vargas Llosa (‘The three doors’, TVE-1) deserved more minutes and greater depth in the questions.
It was an interview that seemed short in time and intention. But I am glad that it has provided us with moments that invite reflective meditation. I say it because Vargas Llosa has an existential trajectory (85 years old) as interesting as it is controversial.
At the end of the 60s, in Barcelona, every aspiring ‘progressive’ had to meet a requirement: walk down Las Ramblas with two books under his arm. One, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Gabriel Garcia Marquezand two, ‘The city and the dogs’ by Mario Vargas Llosa. With these two signs of progressive identity one entered the Glacier, or the Café de la Ópera, and was very successful in the gatherings that took place there.
Today, for the environments of the left and the progressive ‘mainstream’, Vargas Llosa It has gone from being a reference to an accommodating creature with touches of reactionism.
he asked precisely Mary for that intolerance towards people who change their ideas and opinions throughout life. And the Nobel Prize said: «When I was young I was a communist. But over the years I realized that in communism there was a great loss of freedom.
That moment deserved more travel. They could have made use of that ingenuity attributed to Winston Churchill: “If at 20 you are not on the left, it is because you do not have a heart, but if at 40 you continue to be, it is because you have no brain”, and give it a spin. And perhaps they had found some rational, Cartesian place in which the heart and the brain could fit at the same time.
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Another moment that needed more immersion was when Vargas Llosa evoked, with melancholy, that Barcelona of the 70s, that explosion of culture with Carmen Balcells Y Carlos Barral making literature an essential food.
“How much has changed, how different! I lived five years in Barcelona, and I never met an independentist! oh! That brushstroke required a more complete analysis. All things considered, he is right: in the 1970s independence did not exceed 18% at most. But you should be warned Vargas Llosa that this was so because Mariano Rajoy It had not yet been instituted in the great manufacturer of independentistas.