By Robert JA Basilio, Jr.,
Opinion and Engagement Editor
Love is a bit like Mario Vargas Llosa’s visit to Manila. It’s sweeter — perhaps even more exciting — the second time around.
The first time Mr. Vargas Llosa came over was in the late 1970s when he was president of PEN International. At that time, dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos was still alive, the Philippines was under military rule, and Vargas Llosa’s future partner, Spanish-Filipina socialite Isabel Preysler, was still married to Spanish singer and songwriter Julio Iglesias.
Forty or so years later, during Mr. Vargas Llosa’s second visit, things were different, if surreal.
The Philippines was observing the third anniversary of Haiyan (local name: Yolanda), the strongest typhoon ever to hit land, the country’s Supreme Court cleared the way for Marcos to be buried at the National Heroes’ cemetery, and, as fate would have it, Mr. Vargas Llosa was all set to get an honorary degree from De La Salle University (DLSU), (having already received another one from the University of Sto. Tomas [UST] a day earlier). But this time around, during both awarding ceremonies, the Peruvian writer was accompanied by Ms. Preysler, whom he had been seeing since 2015.
When asked about this relationship during a briefing in Makati City last week, the 2010 Nobel prize winner for literature said that his love life was not for public consumption.
“Love is a fantastic experience, probably the richest that we have had,” Mr. Llosa said in English at the offices of the Instituto Cervantes, which organized his trip. “But it’s private.”
He added: “When it becomes public, it impoverishes it — it becomes banal. Public expressions of love banalize love so I don’t want to banalize this fantastic, marvelous experience and for me, it is and will always be private.”
That wasn’t the only time the suave, urbane, and internationally acclaimed novelist was able to evade tricky questions.
During the same briefing, a Spanish-speaking journalist sought his comments about the massive number of suspected drug users and dealers who were killed through extra-judicial means all across the Philippines, supposedly prompted by its current president, known as The Punisher.
Mr. Vargas Llosa, an outspoken defender of human rights and a critic of both leftists and rightists, was also tight-lipped.
“I have just arrived and I don’t have the minimal perspective to give a political opinion about the Philippines,” he said. “I think that would be very arrogant. I don’t want to be expelled from the country yet.”
As someone who ran for president of Peru in 1990 (and lost), Mr. Vargas Llosa was able to parry sensitive questions and, at the same time, deliver convincing soundbites, a skill he may have learned the hard way during the one and only political campaign of his life.
Despite being a persuasive speaker, Mr. Vargas Llosa overlooked several crucial factors that undermined his presidential bid, his campaign adviser Mark Malloch Brown said.
One of them was in the field of political communication, said Brown, a partner of Sawyer Miller (now Weber Shandwick), an American public relations firm that also handled the late president Corazon C. Aquino’s bid against Marcos in the 1986 elections.
“Political communication is two things: definition and repetition,” Mr. Brown wrote in UK-based Granta Magazine’s Summer 1991 issue in a piece entitled “The Consultant.” “Mario was a master at intellectually defining an issue and a policy. But he avoided repetition. He always moved on to the next item. [The late UK prime minister Margaret R.] Thatcher made dullness a virtue; she never tired of saying the same thing.”
Mr. Brown added: “In Peru, with a simpler electorate grappling with more novel ideas through a less efficient mass media, this aspect of Mrs. Thatcher above all others required emulating. It was the one which least interested Vargas Llosa.”
A little more than 20 years later, the Vargas Llosa that Brown wrote about appeared to no longer exist.
In Manila, during the Instituto Cervantes briefing and his hour-long lecture at the UST — which, by the way, was delivered extemporaneously — the arguably best president that Peru never had focused on one core message: the power of literature to shape the world and make it a better place.
“The great contribution of literature to progress [is its ability] to develop in us a critical spirit of the real world,” he said during the briefing. “It presents us with worlds that are better, more coherent, richer… which the real world doesn’t have.”
Similarly, during his lecture at UST — delivered in Spanish and simultaneously translated in English by Fundacion Santiago’s Chaco Molina — Mr. Vargas Llosa emphasized that the written word remained a useful, potent tool against political power, especially those who would abuse it.
“Literature is the greatest weapon against power,” Mr. Vargas Llosa said. “All dictatorships have always seen literature with distrust. Why? Literature has been the seminal point of rebellion and subversion.”
After all, he added, “literature is an activity that awakens rebellious attitude, dissatisfaction, or dislike for what is here, for the world presented to us.”
During his lecture, he also told his audience — and the world at large — that while literature does make us dissatisfied with reality, we nevertheless can aspire to be something “different and better,” citing among others the “improved democratic space” in Latin America, previously known for its coup d’ etats and authoritarian governments.
“We can construct a future in the direction that we choose,” Mr. Llosa said, a piece of advice that proved all along that while he may have been a loss for politics, he was nevertheless literature’s gain.
