Mario Vargas Llosa & Isabel Preysler: An evening in a yellow room

Paul Newman. Clint Eastwood. Ted Kennedy. Mario Vargas Llosa…

These were the names on a long list of personalities interviewed by Isabel Preysler for Hola! magazine in 1985 — one penciled in each month, a task that would take her two years and is as riddled with delicious stories as any Latin American novel.

“I didn’t even know Mario at first,” shares Isabel, a Spanish model and former beauty queen born in the Philippines, about Vargas Llosa, the legendary Peruvian writer, journalist and college professor who would win the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. “But we became friends afterwards and he would end up as my favorite (on Hola!’s list of interviewees).”

Decades after that fateful meeting in Missouri, the two would find themselves in each other’s arms — just last year after the death of Isabel’s husband Miguel Boyer, and after Mario’s separation from wife Patricia Llosa. 

“We combine very well,” describes Isabel. “We are so different and that makes for a great combination.”

Do they ever have arguments, misunderstandings and all those little foibles of love?

“The only thing we ever argue on is punctuality,” she answers. “Mario is always ahead of time, and I’m always rushing (laughs).”

The couple are on a whirlwind tour of Manila, the Nobel laureate having been invited by Instituto Cervantes for several engagements — including a lecture at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) where he received a honorary professorship, as well as a conferment of an honorary doctorate at De La Salle University (DLSU). This is the land of Isabel’s birth and Mario is endlessly fascinated. According to Isabel, “When I told Mario about the place where I was born, he said the Philippines reminds him of his homeland.”

There will be encounters and a sharing of epiphanies with relatives, friends, members of the media, university students, fans of Mario Vargas Llosa novels such as The War of the End of the World, The Discreet Hero, Death in the Andes, The Green House, among other titles, as well as a reconnection with magic-realistic Manila, which Vargas Llosa visited in the ’70s when things were a bit grimmer. 

“I was here in 1978 for the PEN conference,” he recalls. “It’s half the city as it is now — Manila has changed a lot.” He recently reminisced with National Artist F. Sionil Jose about the temper of the times in a city under martial law. “A lot of writers and journalists were imprisoned at that time. The organization tried to liberate some of them. Human rights and censorship were among the topics discussed at the convention.”

Vargas Llosa has written and talked lengthily about how dictators fear a type of literature that is free and unshackled.

“Why do all dictatorships that have surfaced on the planet regard literature with distrust?” he asked. “Why do dictators try to control, somehow, this human activity which appears to be harmless and benign… this activity of creating and telling stories? The dictatorships are absolutely right in fearing literature, because it has been the seminal point of resistance and subversion. When one reads the Great Books, even if those books don’t deal with ideology or politics, they awaken somehow in each one of us a critical attitude vis-à-vis the world as it is — and a drive, sometimes confused and uncertain, to change the world.”

The power to be able to imagine a parallel life is an attitude that defends against manipulation. And that is a bane of any authoritarian or totalitarian regime which wants to have power over us, from the cradle to the grave, determining the way we conduct ourselves. They want citizens to shy away from imagination.

“Literature is dangerous… it awakens a rebellious attitude in us,” Vargas Llosa continues. It opens up an arsenal of convictions. “Isn’t that true? After we’ve read a wonderful book that captures our imagination and enlightens us — Don Quixote by Cervantes, or Ulysses by Joyce, or any novel by Faulkner, for example — life suddenly becomes different, richer, and more comprehensive.”

Our eyes then become new, critical eyes. We seek alternatives.

“Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society that wants to be free,” the writer explains.

The path began for Vargas Llosa as a five-year-old Peruvian kid growing up in Cochabamba, Bolivia, discovering the joy of reading for the first time.

“I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.”

His literary vocation was a consequence of his love for books. “When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn’t know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot — fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration. It has established common denominators among countries and created a community, which didn’t exist when I was young.”

Vargas Llosa has become a beacon of sorts in that congregation of written-word worshippers. He was in the US when he heard the news that he had won the Nobel.

“I was teaching at Princeton, just a week or 10 days or so in New York, when I got the call… I was surprised!”

Despite the awards and accolades, the man is still hard a work: jotting down entire plots and dialogue in longhand, working on a new novel the same way a prizefighter would train for a fight.

“The real inspiration for a writer is perspiration, as George Bernard Shaw said. It’s hard work.”

And the fruits, of course, are meant to be leafed through deliciously.

“There is no manual that can better enrich us than a good book,” he explains. Names such as Proust, Balzac and Flaubert are rattled off, followed by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekov; and how when we read these writers there appears a chasm of distance, beliefs and cultures. Those elegant French, those elegiac Russians. “But good books reveal a similarity of feeling, of behaving, of loving, of hating — that makes us one. Because there is just one humanity. Nothing can defend us better against ignorance, prejudice and racism than good literature.” 

Vargas Llosa hopes that he and others like him who have devoted their lives to telling stories have contributed their own grain of sand to a world of dignity and truth.

At the end of our interview, Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Preysler will step out from their bright yellow room to meet friends in another limb of Manila. The night is but a foreword.