The first sentence of Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador (The Storyteller)¹ gives a start, a shock, a double take, as the narrator misses a step to gasp with surprise. Facing him is precisely the thing he had escaped. “I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while, and behold, the damned country forced itself upon me this morning in the most unexpected way” (S [The Storyteller], 3; 7). The first move of the story is no departure but an about-face, a shocking recognition that Peru will not be left behind. Long before the narrator identifies himself as a writer named Mario Vargas Llosa, even before the text spells out any identity or attributes, any subjectivity, background, or future for the speaker, he responds to Peru in this syncopated moment of choosing to leave and being taken aback. His double take is an involuntary reflex that will trigger reflection. Hailed by an authority that can stop him short and call him home, the call begins to constitute Vargas Llosa as a character.

HALT

This is the way Louis Althusser understood the subject of an ideology: as one who responds to authority—when, for example, a policeman yells, “Hey you!” to someone who is running. The runner can respond by accepting the interpellation of the law and stopping dead.² And, more to the point here, the narrator's halt is like the commanding moment in Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, when the subject is born from the labor of facing an unknowable, but inescapable, Other who demands recognition. Transfixed and helpless in their derivative identity and in their humbling mortality, Levinas's subject and Vargas Llosa's character practically shudder at the awful impact of a human face that issues divine demands. The novel that follows is about the face, which is inscrutable on ethical, not on epistemological, grounds. After the stunning first sentence stops the narrator in his escapist tracks, the paragraph continues, fixed on photos from Peru:

I had visited Dante's restored house, the little Church of San Martino del Véscovo, and the lane where, so legend has it, he first saw Beatrice, when, in the little Via Santa Margherita, a window display stopped me short [me paró en seco]: bows, arrows, a carved oar, a pot with a geometric design, a mannequin bundled into a wild cotton cushma. But it was three or four photographs that suddenly [de golpe] brought back to me the flavor of the Peruvian jungle. The wide rivers, the enormous trees, the fragile canoes, the frail huts raised up on pilings, and the knots of men and women, naked to the waist and daubed with paint, looking at me unblinkingly [contemplándome fijamente] from the glossy prints.

Naturally, I went in. With a strange shiver and the presentiment that I was doing something foolish, that I was putting myself at risk [arriesgándome] out of mere curiosity.

(S, 3-4; 7; my emphasis)

The commanding images draw Vargas Llosa and turn him toward Peru, threatening nothing less than his freedom to be far away, a subject-centered freedom that Levinas would have recognized as ethically suspect.³ Curiously, though, the riveting presence of Peru is only a trace here, instead of the flesh and blood that would command a Levinasian engagement, face-to-face.⁴ The glare of pictures comes from already absent faces, flattened into two photographic dimensions to show already evacuated Indians, as well as the modern technologies of evacuation. The contradiction between the passivity of pictures and their active subject-effect on the narrator, “staring at me,” is not only a symptom of what Lacan might have called paranoia about things that know more than people;⁵ we will see that the contradiction is also a symptom of the novel's general indecision about Indians, in a country where they are either its deepest soul or its most stubborn obstacle to development.

Besides providing a double start for this story, the scene of impossible flight may also be an evocation of another Peruvian writer who had stopped in Italy years before and had been just as dramatically pulled homeward. Perhaps himself a sign for so many New World subjects digging for European roots, that Peruvian turned up more contrasts than confirmations, confirming his Americanist calling. In any case, the reflexive traveler seems, by now, an unlikely secret sharer for a narrator named after the increasingly conservative Mario Vargas Llosa.⁶ The other errant American in Italy was José Carlos Mariátegui, chief ideologue in the 1920s for the indigenized Marxism that has, until now, marked left-wing Peruvian politics.⁷

In Italy I felt the fragility of the lie that makes us a spiritual annex of Rome. I understood how alien we Spanish-Americans were at that banquet. I perceived simply and precisely how artificial and arbitrary was the flimsy myth of our kinship with Rome. … Like him [Waldo Frank], I didn't feel American except in Europe; on the streets of Europe I encountered that American country which I had left and where I had lived almost in absence, as a stranger. Europe revealed how much I belonged to a primitive and chaotic world, and at the same time it imposed on me the responsibility for an American project.⁸

Visions of a primitive world would compel Vargas Llosa's narrator, too, but more theatrically than in Mariátegui's nonfictional memoirs. The novel practically makes the pictures into protagonists who hail the speaker and dictate his mission. Whereas Mariátegui turns inward on his own American self during the famous disencounter with Italy, Vargas Llosa stages a sharp turn around, toward the American Other. The jolt of recognition is dramatic, probably to capture the disaffected narrator, and perhaps to capture readers who may have imagined themselves equally free from home. If Mariátegui had located an internally divided Peruvian self, between modernized Occidental and traditional “Oriental,” Vargas Llosa doesn't presume to contain the contradictory sides.

Either this reluctance to contain Peru is a facile admission of limits, based on rigid notions of difference between Indian tradition and modern projects, or the lack of presumption can be an ethical caution against containment and control of the incommensurate cultures in a multifarious nation. On the one hand, Vargas Llosa could be absolving himself from the moral obligation of inclusiveness and tolerance, a likely hand, given his impatient prescriptions for neutralizing and nationalizing specifically Indian cultures. But on the other hand, more promisingly, the refusal could be read against his politics, as a defense of difference. El hablador may not be an argument for the survival of parallel and simultaneous story lines; but the novel is a sustained performance of simultaneity. Primitive Peru is, admittedly, outside of the narrator named Vargas Llosa. But it holds him, along with us, hostage in its gaze.

The promise of recognition is gripping, and it announces the recursive shape of the entire novel, circling around the same sticking point of Peru's claim on our attention and returning obsessively to the confrontation in Florence. To repeat the danger and to predict calamities inside the novel as well as out, we should note that the grip may be paralyzing and nonnegotiable in ways that portend unethical responses to entrapment.⁹ The dilemma underlines a certain peril in the Levinasian moment of ethical engagement, a peril that comes into focus once the moment of confrontation drags into the messiness of narrative development. The problem is that unstinting attention to the Other cannot remain static and unblinking; the following move is either an identification with otherness so complete that it denies one's self or a self-preserving dismissal of the agonist. Absolute alterity, it seems, can make one kind of aggression or another practically inevitable. It leaves no room, philosopher Enrique Dussel worries, for the social dynamism that Latin America desperately needs.¹⁰

Vargas Llosa would experiment with both ways out of the Levinasian hold. Through a selfless storyteller, he wrote that any interference with the Other is murder: “‘These cultures must be respected,’ he said. … ‘And the only way to respect them is not to go near them. Not touch them’” (S, 98-99; 96-97). But more consistently, he has argued as a sorry, but single-minded, spokesperson for necessary interference and incorporations: “It is tragic to destroy what is still living, still a driving cultural possibility, but I am afraid we shall have to make a choice. … [W]here there is such an economic and social gap, modernization is possible only with the sacrifice of the Indian cultures.”¹¹ Nevertheless, El hablador, at least, keeps the alternatives in tension and fixes the dilemma into static, unnerving irresolution. The rhythm of this novel is almost lyrical in its reluctance to move beyond the gripping moment, into the unethical disorder of historical time.

TURN

The visions that rush at the halting narrator would soon conjure up memories of talk, as if to move him from confrontation to engagement,¹² or perhaps simply to move into a medium that might privilege narrative. The memories bring back a Jewish friend who had studied anthropology in Lima and become fascinated with the fragile existence of the Amazonian Machiguengas. That was before the misfit friend, called Mascarita, for the birthmark that covered half his face, disappeared from the capital, maybe to settle in Israel. His non-Jewish mother and his refugee father had produced the divided, or doubled, identity of their son, grotesquely masked in the two-tone face, so that Saúl Zuratas fit nowhere in Peru. (The splintered life and the line of escape are apparently modeled after the novelist Isaac Goldemberg. Like Mascarita, Goldemberg moved from his mother's province to his father's Jewish community in Lima. Then he went to Israel and to New York, where he told the story, The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner [1979].)¹³

Zuratas had abandoned anthropology early on, because, among other murderous incursions of modernity, he said ethnography itself was killing Indians. His professor seems incredulous:

“Saúl's starting to have doubts about research and fieldwork. Ethical doubts. … [H]e's taken it into his head, can you believe it, that the work we're doing is immoral. … He's convinced that we're attacking them, doing violence to their culture. … That with our tape recorders and ball-point pens we're the worm that works its way into the fruit and rots it. …” Saúl Zuratas had flabbergasted everyone, proclaiming that the consequences of the ethnologists' work were similar to those of the activities of the rubber tapers, the timber cutters, the army recruiters, and other mestizos and whites who were decimating the tribes. “He maintained that we've taken up where the colonial missionaries left off. That we, in the name of science, like them in the name of evangelization, are the spearhead of the effort to wipe out the Indians.”

(S, 32-33; 33-34)

In a novel structure redeployed from Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977),¹⁴ where chapters from young Mario's autobiographical romance alternate with suggestively similar scenes in radio soap operas, El hablador switches back and forth from one kind of narration to another, from a history of the Hispanic intelligentsia in Lima to an evocation of repetitive Amazonian lore. The style of the evocation, it should be said, is a cause for concern in a novel that seems to respect culturally specific languages, because the indigenous sounds are familiar from Quechua-inflected Spanish, with its trailing gerunds (diciendo, hablando) at the end of sentences, for example.¹⁵ The Andean sounds are so improbable in the jungle that the effect is to suggest the writer's indifference to Indians.

One structural disparity between El hablador and Aunt Julia is that the story lines of the ethnographic novel don't implode into the hilarious jumble of the radio-style romance, where real life takes leads from fiction, and high art aspires to the charm of kitsch. Instead, the slips from one side to the other in El hablador feel like raids or contaminations. One story line overtakes the other, tragically. The overlaps are aggressions, not ironies; and differences vanish because they are overridden, not because they are misprized. Alternating chapters move from the narrator's memories of Saúl amid activities in Lima's mass media, to chapters in the hablador's voice, recitations of creation myths and cultural history of a people described as the dispersed and precarious Machiguengas. The tribe barely holds together through the act of ritual telling. That is why the American missionaries are so monstrous in the end, with their translated vernacular Bibles that evacuate lore from language. By the time Bible fragments filter into the jungle stories (adapted from the translations of Padre Joaquín Barriales), they sound like a prelude to doom.

The narrative slips might have suggested flexibility, the creative indefinition of frontiers that animates Aunt Julia. If one culture is not entirely immune to another, it may not be allergic, either. Millennial traditions can be adaptive, as activists for cultural survival argue.¹⁶ But here, the Machiguenga names that the narrator drops in his own story (e.g., S, 173, 181-82; 168, 176) amount to decoration rather than to a dynamic cultural disturbance. And on the other side, the unbidden biblicized tales of Tasurinchi-jehová, his triple form, an expulsion and a future annihilating wind (S, 215-21; 207-12) profoundly disturb listeners for whom time itself should work differently. “For the Machiguengas,” the narrator explains unambiguously, as if to forestall any more interpretation, “history marches neither forward nor backward: it goes around and around in circles, repeats itself” (S, 240; 229), so their response is to leave, to further disperse in an ever more precarious jungle (S, 240; 230). A small number of the tribe had survived natural disasters (thanks to their modest expectations of nature and to inflexible standards for themselves), and some had escaped the forced labor of lumber and rubber barons (by moving ever deeper into hardly habitable jungle), but the remnant is finally overpowered by translators:

Those apostolic linguists of yours [Saúl protests to Mario] are the worst of all. They work their way into the tribes to destroy them from within. … The others steal their vital space and exploit them or push them farther into the interior. At worst, they kill them physically. Your linguists are more refined. They want to kill them in another way. Translating the Bible into Machiguenga! How about that!

(S, 95-96; 93-94, see also 162-63; 157)

The accusation, and by extension the whole novel as a debate-driven drama about the future of Indians in the Americas, may remind some readers of the revolutionary climate that the jungle would incubate after Mario and his friend disputed the country's future between 1953 and 1956 (S, 34; 36). In 1963, when Saúl was reported in Israel (new that makes Mario intone a prayer to Tasurinchi for his friend's safety from border conflicts [S, 108; 106]), student rebellions were flaring in Peru (see S, 242; 232). During the same 1963, long before the Sendero Luminoso launched its guerrilla in 1980,¹⁷ some Cuba-inspired intellectuals were trying to trigger rebellions in focal points throughout the countryside. One early foco was in the jungle town of Puerto Maldonado, where an unlikely combatant and victim was a personal friend of Mario. It was Javier Heraud, the well-known poet who was hardly more than a boy and who had recently been in Paris, making the rounds of cafés and bookstores with Vargas Llosa. Still stunned and grieving, his eulogy is an indictment of a desperate country. “That Javier Heraud should decide to take up arms and become a guerrilla only indicates that Peru has arrived at a breaking point. No one was further from violence than he, by temperament and conviction.”¹⁸ The memory returns in the novel, when the narrator mentions his frustrating 1981 trip to Puerto Maldonado. The entire production team of his television series “The Tower of Babel” went there to recreate the battle and to commemorate Heraud, although their dysfunctional equipment “screwed up” the effort (S, 149-50; 144-45). The martyred poet is the subject of another novel contemporaneous with El hablador; Aida Balta's 1987 El legado de Caín names Heraud among the country's irrecuperable losses to violence.

Heraud's move from the capital to the tribal interior may find a tribute in Vargas Llosa's portrayal of Saúl's desertion of the academy for the people it studies. But the fictional friend is a different kind of rebel. Saúl's specific rage is about cultural imperialism. Beyond the armed struggle at Puerto Maldonado, there was a distinctively anthropological battle being waged by nationalist ethnographers. One stimulus was the self-reflexive and engaged ethnology of José María Arguedas (1911-1969), whose Andean boyhood and cultural ties were giving social science a local cast. His enormous contributions to ethnology are sometimes overshadowed by Arguedas the novelist, wrote Angel Rama in a eulogy for the tormented bicultural man who had committed suicide.¹⁹ It was that novelist, with his flair for ethnology, who surely inspired Vargas Llosa as he doubled himself, irreconcilably, in the homonymic narrator of personal histories and in the nameless hablador.²⁰ Arguedas is the only Peruvian writer about whom Vargas Llosa repeatedly writes and teaches.²¹

During the 1960s and 1970s, local ethnologists were taking positions for and against interference from foreigners, including American anthropologists who tended to idealize “native” cultures.²² The standard line of thought, and of government programs from the 1930s to the 1960s, favored a dynamic mestizaje, a politics that amounted to progress toward national integration and that objected to pristine indigenous cultures.²³ But progressive anthropologists in Vargas Llosa's generation, according to Enrique Mayer, read the Americans' respect for Andean continuity as welcome relief from the establishment's renewed denigration of Indians. It was conservative Peruvians such as Vargas Llosa, and his conservationist alter ego Zuratas, who used anthropological romanticism to defend static and extreme distinctions between tradition and modernity; they were counterpoising “deep Peru” (doomed as backward and Indian) to “official Peru” (the modern and whitened future), and getting the country into “deep trouble,” Mayer says.

Critics are right to say that Zuratas is driven by the same abstract language of cultural incommensurability that defines Vargas Llosa's dichotomous and inflexible politics. But the novel's indigenist hero is not simply a sentimental double for its writer. Saúl is also the novel's vehicle for lingering in “deep Peru” during as many pages as are devoted to the official country. Whatever rush toward modernity may be moving the plot and pushing Vargas Llosa's political pronouncements, whatever evacuation confronts us from the first page of picture-book Indians, the novel performs a parity of attention span between tradition and modernity. It detains the rush for as long as we read. In fact, the “deep” and “official” lines will cross, in the crossover hero himself and in narrative threads that weave from one context to another. The borrowings bring back the Peruvian tradition of dialectical anthropology, even though the novel will frame the dynamism as contamination rather than adaptability. However Zuratas is framed, whether as the conservative's alter ego or as a self-defeating dreamer, his indigenous world holds us throughout the novel. Through Saúl, Vargas Llosa seems reluctant, not just guilty, to let go.

While debates about “American” anthropology simmered during the 1960s, another American interest in Peru was more explosive. The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) outraged traditionalists, who, like Saúl, railed against the “apostolic linguists.” SIL had been founded in the early 1950s by North American evangelical Protestants known as the Wycliffe Bible Translators (named for the fourteenth-century English translator), who shared McCarthy's anticommunist mission. From the beginning, SIL counted on support from USAID and the CIA to establish bases throughout the underdeveloped world.²⁴ Its declared purpose was to study indigenous languages; in fact, SIL also established bilingual schools and vaccination campaigns, and otherwise introduced isolated peoples into an expanding market economy and state institutions, all of which pleased local governments. But SIL's most devout purpose, as everyone knew, was conversion. Indigenous languages mattered because they were potential vehicles for the Bible. The enterprise elicited countless conspiracy theories. Between them, David Stoll balances some complicated details:

Wycliffe has fielded linguistic missionaries in more than 300 languages, supported by air and radio networks and sponsored by governments. Although it has started [in 1982] to lose government contracts … in the mid-1970s Wycliffe was an official arm of the governments of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Surinam, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. Unless all the mission orders of the Roman Catholic Church were counted as one, no other transnational organization surpassed Wycliffe's influence among Indians. None matched its command of Indian languages and loyalties, its logistical system and official connections. Nor did any collide so spectacularly with Indian civil rights organizing and Latin American nationalism. The ties binding together this interior empire, to native people and to governments, started to snap.

(FM [Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America], 2)

Local pressure strained SIL's delicate legitimacy, as the missionaries of God's truth kept telling strategic lies about their linguistic interests. “Then governments started to decide that SIL might be a useful sacrifice” (FM, 201). They warned Washington that SIL's influence had limits, as a way of conceding to Indian and indigenist oppositions while maintaining control. In Peru, SIL's days were numbered until 1976; Brazil issued an embargo against SIL in 1977; Colombia threatened SIL's expulsion; Mexico revoked SIL's contract in 1979; Panama followed in 1981; Ecuador ordered it to leave within the same year.

Each government faced the same, disquieting phenomenon: increasingly visible, militant Indian organizing. Indigenous nationalism was on the ascent, a trend to which, like a number of other brokers, SIL had contributed in largely unintended ways. Promotion of literacy, the trade language and inter-group contacts helped members of scattered local communities identify themselves as ethnic wholes.

(FM, 201)

Accused of everything from fronting for U.S. imperialism and misleading potentially Catholic souls to fomenting communist conspiracies, the relentless linguists are the main concern of chapter 4 in El hablador.²⁵ It is not that Catholic evangelizers (so visible in La casa verde [1965]) were more benign, explains Saúl, but that they had fortunately become too isolated and impoverished to do much harm. By contrast, the Bible-belt evangelists have the resources to conquer peoples who had resisted everyone else, from the Incas to the colonizers and the capitalists (96-97; 94-95).

Vargas Llosa personalizes the history of the Summer Institute with mentions of his own visits (beginning in 1958) to an Amazonian camp, mentions condensed from his memoir about writing La casa verde.²⁶ Despite warnings from the Hispanophile historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea about the nefarious influence of the meddling gringos, the narrator accompanied anthropologist José Matos Mar on an expedition organized for Juan Comas, a Mexican colleague. In his fictional persona, Matos is the mentor of an increasingly unwilling Saúl Zuratas, whose reluctance prefigures the generally “third world” skepticism about ethnography's interests and interferences, as Edward Said describes it.²⁷ Today's self-critical anthropology is one response, although sometimes care can lead to even more self-interestedness, precisely by focusing on the investigating self instead of “objective” data. Conversely, some missionaries respond to the moral dilemmas of conversion—to saving souls by denigrating native religious identities—with tolerance (or at least forbearance) of “specific, limited, cultures.” Their mission can be preventive rather than acquisitive; it can be the obligation to bear witness in order to obstruct authoritarian power. “Not being able to speak for others, however, does not mean we have no obligation toward them.”²⁸

Other observers take liberties to speak. One who spoke up for the Summer Institute's meddling was Mario Vargas Llosa. In 1976, seven years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia showed that Cuba was in dutiful step with the aggression, Vargas Llosa had long since abandoned socialist ideals. As he moved to ever more conservative positions, he found SIL in need of support. The novelist was grateful to the translators; their literal agility had helped him to write La casa verde. They were adept not only at moving from one language to another but also at getting from one place to another inside the apparently impassable greenery. Vargas Llosa did his research among the “primitives” with the help of the polyglots' airplanes.²⁹ Other outsiders had benefited, too, he recalls, echoing Saúl's (and David Stoll's) list of ethically suspect allies: ethnologists, missionaries, teachers, and soldiers (S, 72; 71). But the suspicions did not complicate Vargas Llosa's political support. In a public letter of 25 April 1976, he urged the Peruvian government to renew SIL's contract with the country. The linguists should be liberated from the suspicious indigenists, he declared. The government evidently agreed; if SIL were to leave, the institutions it had initiated could be overtaken by more dangerous groups, such as communists and Indian organizers. The letter was published in the major papers of Lima, and co-signed by sixty-five notable citizens, later seconded by sixty-six others. None of these was a linguist, Stoll reports; and the few participating education officials, indigenists and anti-Marxist academics, hardly offset the number of retired military leaders (FM, 205).

A dozen years later, however, despite the echo of thanks to the linguists on the back page of acknowledgments in El hablador, and despite his alleged support for scientific investigation beyond “nativism,”³⁰ the dilemma about the rights of translation had apparently revisited the troubled novelist. The return of the repressed is written into every aggressive photo that accosts his narrator in Florence. During the time between La casa verde and El hablador, the world had turned, and anxieties once directed at the jungle were now fixed on the Andes. From 1985 to 1987, while Vargas Llosa was writing El hablador, Peru's splitting political seams were unraveling more dangerously along the Andean mountain range than inside the Amazonian basin. The Indians who now seemed most at risk, and risky, were no longer the tribesmen of the lowlands but the perhaps dangerous peasants of the Altiplano. Once the Sendero Luminoso loosed confusion on the Andes, outside observers had trouble distinguishing “revolutionary” terrorism from “official” military abuses. Nor was it clear where the doubly imperiled indigenous communities stood politically. Displaced back to the jungle, the worries about Indians must have seemed safer.

Displacement is a mechanism Freud named when he noticed that problems so grave as to threaten the subject with annihilating abjection were routinely substituted by peripheral signs. When an experience is too painful to remember and too intense to forget, memory replaces that event with a related, but inoffensive, element. The process is metonymic, a sliding from the essential part of that experience to “something in the neighborhood.”³¹ And in the general neighborhood of the country, the most urgent problem was no longer in Amazonia. Vargas Llosa's soul-searching and sympathy during the 1980s might well have been displaced from the tangles of the highlands onto the forgotten front in the jungle. How sobering and sad it is to notice that a defensive mechanism like displacement finds no safe terrain in Peru but only in more or less urgently troubled territory. Self-conscious novel that this is (or self-interpretive in ways that preempt criticism), the text glosses or rationalizes the difference. Saúl argues that Andean culture has been contaminated since the Conquest, and the faster it can be fully absorbed into the Peruvian nation, the better for the already marginalized Indians; Amazonia, however, is still unconquered and independent. Absorption there, Saúl says, would bring only cultural death and ecological disaster (S, 100; 98).

In the quiescent jungle, the novel's peace-loving Machiguengas are, at first, reticent to change, but they soon become institutionalized in translation camps (S, 161-62; 155-56). With the exception of the storyteller, they raise little resistance to the culturally annihilating goodwill of the foreign linguists. It is his aggressive vagrancy that most distinguishes the storyteller from the others, and it becomes the last piece of the novel's puzzle over the hablador's identity (S, 181; 175). During Mario's second visit to the missionaries' camp, where he is preparing a television special, rumors about a skittish and obscure ritual talker are far more fascinating to him than the “athletic” and well-scrubbed hosts who are translating the Machiguengas into transparency. Readers, of course, have been hearing the hablador's ritualized narrative for several chapters and do not doubt his existence. What is more, his identity had, for a long while, been coming into focus as the red-headed, blotchy-faced, mixed-breed Jew, a millennial martyr to Christianity's forced conversions. He used to be Saúl Zuratas.

Is it Saúl whom Mario anxiously anticipates as he looks through the fifty photos in Florence? After fixing on scenes of scarce, scattered natives bent over their recent and meager crops, crouched among brilliant plumes for weaving crowns, and poised behind bow and arrow near a jungle river, Mario spots him “at first glance” (a primer golpe de vista). A silhouette standing in profile and talking animatedly inside a circle of cross-legged “hypnotically concentrated” Indians. What doubt can there be now? Mario has seen the real thing: “Un hablador” (S, 9; 10). The first chapter ends with this two-word gasp of recognition, after the clerk at the gallery has unglued the speculator from the photo and ushered him out. The very next words, in evident apposition on a second reading, are “Saúl Zuratas.” They begin chapter 2, as well as the novel's pendular rhythm between the city and the selva.

TURN AROUND

For a while, though, the rhythm is detained. The narrative delays its exploration of exotic folklore, and it stays the flights of political reflection. It invites, or commands, readers to withstand, for a bit longer, the Amazonian gaze that accosts and commands the narrator and his readers, perhaps to his peril and to ours. it will take an effort of submission to another's will to stay here, because an unwillingness to stop may be the most flagrant symptom of our spiritually diminished modernity, as Stanley Cavell puts it. He calls attention to this dehumanizing loss of attention span in a classic essay on King Lear, “The Avoidance of Love.” Relentless movement toward problems to be solved, toward anticipated developments, and an uncompromising need for conclusions—all this dynamism rushes beyond presentness and its insoluble mysteries, and rushes to impoverish modern art forms of music, theater, and narrative.³² Vargas Llosa's missionaries of monotheism and modernity are named Schneil, by the way, and are mentioned by name in Saúl's diatribe (S, 34; 36). The name obviously seems a corruption of the German “quick,” in a heavy-handed, redundant image of modernizing assimilation and acceleration. In fact, the real missionaries who translated and then published manageable condensations of Machiguenga lore were named Snell.³³ Vargas Llosa took an orthographic liberty with the name, but history is already uncanny. Being quick and efficient in translating, moving one thing toward another, the missionaries have little capacity for the presentness that myth makes palpable in the recursive recitation of lore. Without that capacity, the most binding human relationships come undone, Cavell complains. Even love can be avoided.

Vargas Llosa's first pages call a temporary halt to the ravages of modernity, a pause in the acquisitive and problem-solving movement through time. They stop to stare hypnotically into the mystery of lost presence. The pages that follow, until the very last one, keep up the recursive rhythm that holds Florence in focus. Everything there, from the picture gallery to the mosquitoes, returns the reader to Peru (S, 33, 73-74, 78, 90, 94, 236-46; 35, 72, 77, 88, 92, 225-35). Arrested from the first page by photographs, in his exercise of a modern prerogative called escape, the narrator doubles back with surprise at seeing an object he had escaped transformed into the subject before him. Vargas Llosa had left Peru behind only to find the country confronting him, defiantly, across the distance. To take a lead from the ironic “behold” in the opening line, it is almost like God confronting Jonah after the reluctant prophet tried to take a different route. Or, to follow up on the feeling of double take, Peru may be more like that unrelenting cat in classic cartoons who is poised, ready to pounce, in the very room to which a desperate mouse has just escaped.

Face-to-face with the cat's demanding ubiquity, in response to its hunger and to the time-space bending enigma of its always being there before one arrives, a mouse is compelled to respond. And the responses to danger, to unsatisfiable demands, to the incommensurable differences between the cat and himself, constitute the mouse as a subject (like the vulnerable narrator who becomes a persona by stopping at Peru's call). Without the confrontation, what would either character be in the cartoon? A deconstructive reading could point to the constitutive overlaps between the agonists: the same turf, an understanding of the conflict, the same desire for victory and survival. Without sharing so much, there could be no cat-and-mouse conflict. On another, psychological reading, the mutual imbrication of antagonists might have a developmental dimension, since the mouse has become what he is through a series of near catastrophes. Because there is no escaping what he is, the catastrophic fantasies accompany the mouse as a structural necessity of his character; a cat appears because the mouse practically conjures him in order to feel normally neurotic.

On one reading, and on the other, we should note that the constructions and imbrications are mutual. They are reflexive, in the sense that reciprocal verbs are reflexive; we see one another, for example. Whether the subjects of the story are called antagonists or, more benignly, interlocutors, an assumption of both deconstruction and of a particular psychological reading is a fundamental parity between the partners. Some years ago, deconstruction's ironizing project promised to level, to decenter and democratize, the polarized terms that structuralism had deployed almost inevitably in hierarchical relationships. It was liberating to see beyond the confining oppositions between male and female, black and white, self and other, to see both in the mire of mutually dependent constructions and into the corollary of destabilizing traces constitutive of meaning itself. This fundamental skepticism about the possibility of true meaning had a profound philosophical and even moral appeal. By denouncing the arrogance of knowing anything absolutely, it made an appeal to carefulness and circumspection.

The problem, of course, for any democratic use of these insights, is that political difference is at risk, if difference seems universally constitutive of any terms and if all tensions relax into partnerships. Self can appreciate its collusion with the Other in ways that mitigate antagonism; male can presume to ally with female; and black becomes an enlightened, recuperable category for right-thinking whites. If troubling barriers seem less important than the fissures that make barriers collapse, from what position does one make demands? The point of an argument can get stuck in the rubble of collapsed categories. A more politically creative style of deconstruction might move from the cracks in one “language game” into another game, through political confrontation, to legal adjustment. Acknowledging difference, then, would be not the final word but a first step toward enabling ethical negotiations.

… AND AROUND

Dynamic and meritorious, maybe even feasible, this unstuck (Wittgensteinian?) twist on deconstruction may be a promising lead for pursuing some readings and some politics,³⁴ but it has almost nothing to do with the opening lines of El hablador. There, relationship is not reflexive, in the reciprocal sense of mutually affective verbs and character constructions; rather, one character is reflective, in both senses of the word: the narrator thinks hard about the Other he would have preferred to ignore, and he is made visible in the Other's light. Instead of partnership between the narrator and Peru, there is astonishment before an already existing, ubiquitously demanding agonist.

Rather than reciprocity, the opening lines offer an initiating asymmetry; what is staged is not a deconstructive tangle of hand-to-hand struggles for meaning, nor a complicitous version of hand-in-hand conspiracies to make meaning stable, but something close to a Levinasian face-to-face. It is a confrontation with an inscrutable face whose godlike stare frames the yet formless “hostage” in a demand for recognition. The very fact that the Other (country, cat, God) is there before us, the fact of time, locks us into responsibility:

Diachrony is the refusal of conjunction, the non-totalizable, and in this sense, infinite. But … this commands me and ordains me to the other, to the first one on the scene, and makes me approach him, makes me his neighbor. … It provokes this responsibility against my will, that is, by substituting me for the other as a hostage. … it is the very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself.³⁵

Hostage first, with persona as a consequence; the Other first, as a precondition for the response that constitutes a subject. The self as a by-product; persona as response-able. With this dramatic reversal of subject-centered ontologies, Emmanuel Levinas wants to trap traditional philosophy in its ethical shortcomings. He focuses on the unmanageable Other who can face off against philosophy and stop short its rapacious march against difference. In a stance similar to Vargas Llosa's tarrying with Amazonian images, Levinas's style detains readers in front of a difference that does not go away. Since the time of Socrates, he says, fundamentally developmentalist and aggressive Western ontology has made difference disappear; it has welcomed difference as a challenge to be overcome and incorporated into the self. Difference has been an opportunity to quest for greater and deeper dimensions of one's own humanity:

This primacy of the same was Socrates's teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside—to receive nothing, or to be free. Freedom does not resemble the capricious spontaneity of free will; its ultimate meaning lies in this permanence in the same, which is reason. Cognition is the deployment of this identity; it is freedom. That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing other limits it. The neutralization of the other who becomes a theme or an object—appearing, that is, taking its place in the light—is precisely his reduction to the same.

(TI [Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority], 43)

“Philosophy is egology” (TI, 44). This is a lapidary charge that Levinas hurls against voracious reason. The uncharacteristic staccato rhythm is surely meant to shock us with lucid simplicity. Sentences like these are stop signs along otherwise rambling and repetitive, passionate and almost excessive passages. My observation is certainly not made to dismiss the page-filling patience of his arguments with philosophy, as he veers away from its totalizing projects of cognitive control toward an openness onto infinity and vulnerability. I do not presume to judge how much detail a philosophical argument requires, though I call attention to Levinas's exorbitant performance. Some of his sentences frankly hover about an issue rather than press a point. The issues related to respect for Otherness, and responsiveness as initiating behavior, are glaringly simple. Anyone who cares to get the point will do so in the first few pages of his two long books and his many essays. But readers who are driven to follow more intellectually complicated and therefore self-flattering routes manage to avoid the obvious, as Cavell and Stanley Fish remind us.³⁶ Readers do not necessarily stop at the signs of difference that command respect, so Levinas engages us there, for a long time, to circle the barricades and to underscore the threshold to which he is pointing. Like Vargas Llosa's circular novel, like the mythic time that preserves the Machiguengas, a dizzy reader can imagine that Levinas's text “marches neither forward nor backward: it goes around and around, repeats itself” (S, 240; 229). He insists doggedly and keeps us occupied with the unflagging energy of almost encantatory reiteration, riveted by the bullet-like condensations, possibly humbled and probably too overwhelmed to muster objections.

With this thrust and parry, Levinas manages to detain philosophers who are circumspect enough to listen. Perhaps he will detain them long enough to impart a different kind of sensibility. From the drive toward closed, controlling, philosophical totality, the alternative sensibility would divert them toward a capacity for wonder at infinity. It might spoil the imperializing appetite for philosophical knowledge (“To know amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity” [TI, 44; my emphasis]), and leave room for an infinite, unsatisfiable desire for the Other. Then, social science would cede to sociability, and instrumentality to love. Saúl Zuratas made that move when he turned from anthropology to the people it presumes to study. “Surely more emotional than rational,” the narrator knows that Saúl's fascination with the Machiguengas is “an act of love rather than intellectual curiosity or the taste for adventure that seemed to lurk in the choice of career made by so many of his fellow students in the Department of Ethnology” (S, 16; 19). This possibility of disinterested identification is the liberating commitment that Enrique Dussel holds out for Latin America as a step beyond Levinasian awe of the absolutely Other.³⁷

The “being,” whose difference Levinas is loathe to reduce, dissents profoundly from its Heideggerian homonym, which was written with a capital letter and pointed beyond people to a general, almost otherworldly horizon between life and death. No less awe-inspiring for Levinas, but more exacting of response, is the “being” that resides in a particular human face, which is the ultimate horizon of our devotion and obligation. His transcendent ethics is rigorously grounded in worldly relationships; nothing is more holy, or more commanding, than a human being.

TURNING AWAY

This is one reason to remember the silhouette standing inside the enraptured circle of the Peruvian picture. It is the man's posture that is disturbing, vis-à-vis (but not face-to-face with) the camera. The photographer catches him sideways, looking at his listeners or at the jungle, in an obviously stolen shot. Probably warned by the traducing missionaries that the hablador would refuse to cooperate, as so many South American Indians refuse and turn away from camera-toting tourists, the professional resorts to sharpshooting. And he produces gorgeous pictures, worthy of his best work on fashion models and furnishings for magazines such as Vogue and Uomo. It is surely not the quality of the photos that earns him the name Malfatti. The pictures are far from badly done, but malfeasance has produced them. Evidence of stealth is, as I said, one disturbing feature of the photo (“‘How did that Malfatti get them to allow him to … How did he manage to … ?’” [S, 6; 10]). Another worry is the very fact that the subject refuses to show his face.

The talker turns away from the host of modernizing Malfattis and missionaries. He makes no demand on the camera's eye nor on the viewer from the Florentine gallery. The man who denies his face thereby refuses to interpellate either viewer or reader as a subject. He will not talk to outsiders, because talking, he knows better than anyone else, works the social magic of acknowledging and legitimating one's interlocutors. The hablador is practically an allegorical figure for what Levinas calls the Saying. Saying is a sonorous appeal to the Other, more gripping than dynamic and as different from the data that are Said as sociality is from science. The talker knows he can preserve an entire vulnerable society by continuing to talk. That is what makes us human, after all, as Wittgenstein would remind philosophers who were losing their way in technical languages and forgetting the commonality of words and their social contexts. The translatable “content” of what the talker says is not the main point of his performance.

The point is to appreciate the enabling enchantment of address. That is why the title character of the novel is the “talker,” in Mrs. Schneil's tentative term (S, 91; 89), or “speaker” in Edwin Schneil's variation (S, 173; 168).³⁸ The word is something of a neologism that seems neutralized by the common “storyteller” of the English translation. Nevertheless, it may be wonderfully apt as a reminder of an obsolescent tradition, a premodern narrative practice, which Walter Benjamin embraced in an essay called “The Storyteller.” It is a tradition of sparse and suggestive tales told to communities, in contrast to modern novels, which are written, pounced upon, and devoured in private.³⁹ The distinction between storyteller and narrator is by now hard to maintain in English, and even harder to hear in the existing Spanish words narrador, or cuentero, or cuentista, so Vargas Llosa forced a new use for hablador. He evidently borrowed it from a colloquial register of Spanish that gives a name to unusual loquacity; but here, out of context, and conjured to capture a role of anonymous, ceremonial locutor, hablador calls attention to its foreignness in European uses. Escuchadores is the equally uncommon, even clumsy, counterpart for those who hear the talk. Oyente would have been the standard Spanish word; it is as unremarkable as the English translation “listener” (S, 209; 201). What is lost in this neutralization of strangeness into easily assimilable terms, I want to argue, is the use-value of the denaturalized words. Vargas Llosa's slightly strained semantics fixed attention on the socializing activity of talking and listening. He emphasized the contact, as opposed to the content; the process, rather than what was being processed.

Given the arresting first sentence of the novel, where Peru itself came out to confront the narrator, the cold shoulder from its most fascinating talker feels like an indictment. Startled into book-length reflections on the tragic heroism of indigenous cultures (reflections exhaustively interpreted and thematized in a novel that seems to make criticism superfluous), the narrator knows that he was the first to turn his back. Vargas Llosa, after all, is a runaway who had forfeited his chance for subjecthood (even in the Hegelian, pre-Levinasian sense of being recognized by the Other) when he averted his eyes from the Amazon that his fellow student was bringing home. The narrator stared a bit then; but only later, as the jungle pursued him, he stared uncomfortably and was unable to look away.

TOWARD JERUSALEM

Some years earlier, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa publicly reminisced about another shock brought on by photographs and about his helplessness in the face of unanswerable demands. The occasion was his acceptance speech of the Human Rights Award from the Congreso Judío Latinoamericano in 1977. At a time when dictatorship was the norm for the continent, the long address in Lima was more concerned with abuses elsewhere. It featured a roster of totalitarian menaces, mostly from misguided socialism abroad and, by extension, from misguided supporters at home. His theme of culturally and technologically advanced civilization that can develop devastating policies of homogenization and control begins, as one may imagine for this occasion, with the national socialism of Germany. Specifically, it begins with a personal memory. Two years before the speech, Vargas Llosa was in Jerusalem, where he was enjoying the rose-colored light and the distance from Peru. He was there not to think about persecution, or even to feel connected with the millennial culture that surrounded him, but to relax and to write Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. This is the novel that develops the alternating structure used later in El hablador. During the mornings of that autumn, he would write in an apartment that looked out on the Tower of David, the Jaffa Gate, and toward hills on the horizon just beyond the Dead Sea:

The vision was beautiful beyond reality and, in my case, it contributed every morning to accenting my sensation of being apart from the world. The story which I was trying to write had as its theme precisely the shifting of reality into unreality by means of melodrama. Since the story took place in Lima, thousands of miles from where I was, it required a real effort to disconnect from my immediate surroundings. In that state of somnambulism, my friend found me, the friend who came every afternoon to show me around the city.⁴⁰

That particular afternoon, the escort did not take Vargas Llosa to the markets or to streets that seemed like stage sets for the Arabian Nights; he drove past Temple excavations, the orthodox quarters of Meah Shearim (the Hundred Gates), and the rest of the magical city. That afternoon, the writer remembers, “the return to reality was brutal. My friend took me to Yad Vashem, the memorial consecrated to the Holocaust, which rises on one of the pine-covered hills that circle Jerusalem.”⁴¹

What was it, exactly, about the memorial that startled the touring somnambulist back to reality? What is it, in fact, that foreign diplomats may see when standard Israeli protocol had, until very recently, required them to visit the shrine? It certainly was not the modern building, or the isolated setting, or even the knowledge that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis in a high-tech eugenic cleanup campaign. Everybody knew that. The otherwise inert historical data about mass graves, advanced biological experiments on practically dead meat, artifacts hewn from human skin, teeth, and bones came into brutal focus through the pictures on the wall. “There, in front of the photos,” Vargas Llosa was also facing Nazi horror and the world's complicity. The pictures frame the 1977 human rights speech (pages 6 and 16), from the initiating shock to a final image of an absolutely lucid demand on the viewer:

There is in Yad Vashem a photograph which, I am sure, everyone has seen at one time or another. … It was taken after the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The picture is of a little Jewish boy, only a few years old, stuffed into a cap too big for him and a coat that looks old, with his hands in the air. A German soldier, wearing a helmet and boots, is aiming at the boy with a short-barrelled rifle, and looking toward the photographer with that blank look they call martial. The soldier looks neither proud nor ashamed of his trophy. His face shows only tranquil indifference to the scene he is acting. In the boy's expression, on the other hand—in the sadness of his eyes, the constriction of his face distorted by fear, and the squeezed shoulders of a body that wants to disappear—there is a dizzying clarity about what that moment means.⁴²

One scene of confronting photos and another cannot be a fortuitous parallel. This cluster of coincidence—the liberating distance from home that he hoped to enjoy in Jerusalem and in Florence, the haunting history memorialized in Yad Vashem and the picture gallery, the structurally sibling novels about narrative and historical contamination between modern reality and lines of escape—suggests a corollary cluster of observations.

THROUGH DIASPORA

The Jewish Saúl becomes a figure for the Machiguengas for reasons beyond a general affinity between one marginalized group and another. He is more than a metaphor for the minority culture condemned to extinction by majoritarian redemption campaigns. For one thing, both nomadic tribes cling to, and are sustained by, ritually repeated narratives that amount to the Law. Diasporic Jews know, in the words of a folk refrain, that “Torah is the best Skhorah (merchandise),” because learning is one thing that cannot be confiscated. And oral—postbiblical—“Torah” is traditionally as important as Scripture itself. For another thing, the Jew as hablador is the kind of metaphor that earns some of its evocative power through a shared history. Had it kept the memory of horrible connections, the figure would have been a metonymy. The world that had stood by in disingenuous disbelief while extermination camps reduced Jews to smoke is the same world that stands by again, while Amazonian Indians are translated and traduced, and while jungle is processed into slum.

To recover the metonymy-turned-metaphor is not to minimize the differences of fate and possible futures between one remnant of a people and another. But we might note that just as Peru's Indians have been demoted and displaced since the Spanish Conquest, Jews were pushed out of Spain in the internal warm-up wars of the Reconquest. And like the Machiguenga misfits who are being squeezed deeper into the Amazon, perhaps to be squeezed out of conservative Peru, European Jews were at a loss to find a place almost anywhere in the Americas. “It is likely that many of them, faced with the upheavals of the last few years, will have opted for the traditional response ensuring their survival: diaspora” (S, 240; 230). During World War II, ships full of refugees were refused at American ports and sent back to German authorities. Even after the war, the Americas kept immigration quotas for survivors so inhospitably low that some waited for years in displaced persons' camps. Others managed to buy visas from the corrupt bureaucracies of Bolivia and Paraguay, while Ecuador and the Dominican Republic were officially hospitable to small numbers of refugees. Brazil took in larger numbers, but only later, after having barred “Semites” before and throughout the war of extermination.⁴³ Sometimes without ever reaching their official destinations, the cosmopolites wandered to centers of westernized economy and culture, or they remained conveniently stuck on the active coastlands.

Mario banters about the last Peruvian indigenist being his friend, the Jew. But Saúl knows that he is a natural:

“Well, a Jew is better prepared than most people to defend the rights of minority cultures,” he retorted. “And, after all, as my old man says, the problem of the Boras, of the Shapras, of the Piros, has been our problem for three thousand years.”

Is that what he said? Could one at least infer something of the sort from what he was saying? I'm not sure. Perhaps this is pure invention on my part after the event. Saúl didn't practice his religion, or even believe in it. I often heard him say that the only reason he went to the synagogue was so as not to disappoint Don Salomón. On the other hand, some such association, whether superficial or profound, must have existed. Wasn't Saúl's stubborn defense of the life led by those Stone Age Peruvians explained, at least in part, by the stories he'd heard at home, at school, in the synagogue, through his inevitable contacts with other members of the community, stories of persecution and of dispersion, of attempts by more powerful cultures to stamp out Jewish faith, language, customs, which, at the cost of great sacrifice, the Jewish people had resisted, preserving their identity?

(S, 99; 97)⁴⁴

Before I had read, or even known about, the Jewish Congress speech, before I could guess at any autobiographical link between photographs at Yad Vashem and Vargas Llosa's haunting book about Peru, I might have imagined that the novel was picking up a narrative design where Julio Cortázar had left off, a design in which pictures of reality put a stop to artistic escape. In “Apocalypse in Solentiname,” the last scene shows Cortázar back in Paris after a trip to Nicaragua. The slides he developed refused to repeat the fanciful primitive paintings by Nicaraguan peasants that had filled his camera frame; instead, the pictures played back the horrors of military repression that he had refused to see. Likewise, photos would force Vargas Llosa to look at an endangered people. The possibility of literary borrowing exists, no doubt. But when I had the opportunity to talk to Vargas Llosa about his novel, the question seemed uninviting. Instead, I asked what had motivated his pairing of the Mosaic cult with the Machiguenga. Almost an idle query, it was meant to go elsewhere, perhaps into the pairing structure of the novel as an experiment in politically tolerant imaginings. If parallel narrative lines were legible and preserved a relative autonomy one from the other, perhaps a country could imagine itself along those lines, despite the narrator's postsocialist skepticism about a future mosaic of Peruvian cultures (S, 78; 76).

As far as the question about Jews and Indians goes, the very leitmotivs of the novel—the parallel marginalizations of Jews and Indians, the annihilating dangers of assimilation, their survival against all odds thanks to a collective narrative—insist on obvious answers, although the novel does not play this up. The point would, of course, have helped Vargas Llosa to explain why he seems as taken with “the people of the Book” as with the Machiguengas. For both premodern cultures, his vocation as narrator would have amounted to the ultimate political career:

I believe that his identification with this small, marginal, nomadic community had—as his father conjectured—something to do with the fact that he was Jewish, a member of another community which had also been a wandering, marginal one throughout its history, a pariah among the world's societies, like the Machiguengas in Peru, grafted onto them, yet not assimilated and never entirely accepted.

(S, 243; 233)

But the answer I got from Vargas Llosa was neither about obvious parallels nor about overlaps. It was, instead, the polar extremes of their difference, he said, that attracted him. They revive the kinds of social and geographic differences whose coordination was the heroic project of nineteenth-century national consolidation, a project inherited from colonial times.⁴⁵ Together, Indians and Jews represented Peru at its limits, like the geo-historical limits of dusty Piura in the north and the steamy jungle on the south side of the Andes that La casa verde barely braces together.⁴⁶ Primitive and poor Amazonian Indians and generally rich cosmopolitan Jews were at opposite ends of the country's population, he explained. And the novel was an effort to talk about Peru in the most inclusive and capacious way possible—from a focus on its demographic extremities.⁴⁷ Surprised by what I took to be an about-face from the intimacy of the vulnerable bedfellows I found in the book, and perhaps personally reluctant to pursue a line that cast Jews, once again, as extraneous to national constructions, the conversation hobbled onto other issues. Only now do I begin to appreciate Vargas Llosa's narrative reach. It went purposefully beyond mainstream Peru, toward an idealized nation, either to argue for continuing the homogenizing Conquest that pursued Indians after it had finished with the Jews or to show that the country was too narrowly focused on consolidation and was obliged to open into a capacious embrace.

TALK CHRISTIAN

Vargas Llosa, the political persona, evidently holds on to the culturally coherent focus. The hold is notorious in a 1983 document commissioned by Peru's President Balaúnde Terry. Appointed to lead an investigation into the murder of eight reporters and photographers in the Andean town of Uchuraccay, Vargas Llosa wrote up the collective report. His authoritative voice there provides the tone for an equally notorious journalistic version of the report called “Inquest in the Andes” (New York Times, 31 July 1983), “Historia de una matanza” in its Spanish form. The possibly profitable Times article, among other damaging details of Vargas Llosa's comportment, was an issue in a subsequent investigation. A skeptical provincial judge, Hermenegildo Ventura Huayhua, appointed to the case in November 1984, grilled the urbane defendant about allegations of official cover-up for military malfeasance and governmental complicity.⁴⁸

In the Times article, Vargas Llosa recalled early speculations that blamed the Sendero Luminoso for yet another act of terrorism, against Indians, police, tourists, and now reporters, speculations that the newspapers were eager to develop. But the evidence that the commission gathered, of ritual mutilations and of the victims' distinctive burial positions, indicted the “innocent” Indians themselves. Skeptics wondered, because although the residents of Uchuraccay were known to take reprisals against terrorism, and were therefore capable of collective violence, their action had always been a response to evident abuse. Moreover, the peasants were clearly outgunned on both sides, by the military and by the guerrillas. And since the signs of violence against the newspapermen differed from the Sendero's typical traces, suspicion fell to the notoriously aggressive and insecure armed forces. The army was new to the area, in order to replace the openly abusive police, and it was just as new to the rigors of legitimate authority. Suspicious, too, was the fact that each of the Indians who testified in the case turned up dead, soon after the commission had absolved the authorities. Later reports, and the incriminating photographs that Vargas Llosa managed not to face, confirmed that neither the killings nor the burials showed any signs of Andean ritual. Instead, bodies were found in pairs, wrapped in plastic and buried in lowlands to promote decomposition, the way North American soldiers buried the Viet Cong.⁴⁹

The commission's report speculated about various motives and scenarios. Oddly, it affirmed them all: maybe the residents had decided to keep all white men safely away from their community, imagining that Senderista encroachments were no different in kind from others; maybe they were especially incensed or terrified by the photographers, who didn't bother to hide from their subjects (much harder to do on the Altiplano than in Amazonia for Malfatti). Vargas Llosa even takes seriously a careless quip by General Roberto Clemente Noel, military commander of counterinsurgency, who said that the Indians probably could not tell a camera from a gun.⁵⁰ In any case, the Indians' alleged failures to distinguish between professionals and delinquents, and no less the Spanish speakers' failure to fully understand their Quechua informants (rushing over the fact that two of the victims spoke Quechua), all bring Vargas Llosa to the conclusion that incomprehension is deadly, and dead-ended: the Indians will simply have to become real Peruvians, to “talk Christian” in Spain's enduring jargon of the Reconquest, because the difference is paid too dearly in white, and mestizo, blood. Indians will finally have to assimilate into a modern state derived from Western principles of democratic responsibility.

The conjectures about ritual murders later took on more fabulous proportions, in the 1993 novel Lituma en los Andes, where the benighted, but lovable, army lieutenant takes almost four hundred pages to figure out why his host village has been safe from the Sendero.⁵¹ The implicit absolution of the army is one measure of the distance between this novel and El hablador, where memories of “civilized” savagery by militia men and mercenaries against Indian leaders revived the horrors detailed in La casa verde.⁵² On his way out of the mining town, now a ghost town without metal or men, Lituma can hardly control his nausea. He has finally solved the mystery of missing bodies, sacrifices to a decaying culture of drunken homosexuality and ritualized cannibalism that appeases pre-Incan gods.⁵³ In the novel, homosexuality is a figure for cannibalism, as if one invasion of the flesh opens irreversibly onto the other. Vargas Llosa's willful version of Andean practices is, no doubt, a metaphor to capture a country turned against itself, but his poetic freedom takes dangerous liberties.⁵⁴ They recall his commission report, both its allegations of Indian barbarism and its vindication of the army.

Homosexuality evidently disturbs Vargas Llosa the novelist.⁵⁵ It disturbs the journalist, too, as when he fretted about the Rainbow Crusade in a piece that chronicles the Gay Rights march on Washington, 25 April 1993. He notes that the democratizing effects of gay activism are now irreversible in the United States, where sexual politics has practically eclipsed other concerns. But the price of legitimacy for the “perverse” population of apparently normal citizens who thronged to the capital and represented far greater numbers could be, he warned, the desexualization of sex. Without some secrecy, without the titillation of almost unspeakable urges or the discreet dangers that whet desire, sex threatens to stop being fun, at least for Vargas Llosa. “Gays and lesbians might come to discover at the end of their efforts to be recognized and considered ‘normal’ that, once the transgressive character of their sexual choice has disappeared, it has lost, if not all, then a good part, of its reason for being. Totally ‘normalized’ sex ceases to be sex.”⁵⁶

Similar objections to banalized homosexuality in the United States had been raised by Reinaldo Arenas, in the book that he finished before ending his own AIDS-ridden life.⁵⁷ But why should Vargas Llosa be ruffled, and even defensive, about the democratizing “perversities” that the Rainbow Crusade chose to flaunt? In the article, he stays carefully uncontaminated by Arenas's sympathies. So cautious is he to write himself into the company of his wife during the march, and during the conversations with activists, that Vargas Llosa seems to safeguard against any possible implication of self-interest in the homoerotic debates between ludicism and legitimacy. Hardly at stake here are the violent intimacies that Vargas Llosa's fictional men visit on their women in one novel after another, including Lituma. In the heterosexual love story of its subplot, the heroine is “saved” from a scene of mock abuse when her naïve hero shoots the client who was paying the prostitute to plead for her life between desperate screams. Hardly in danger at the march, I am saying, are Vargas Llosa's titillating representations of remunerated abuse, or the almost ritualized rape we get in The War of the End of the World, or the range of heterosexual tussles that evidently excite his fiction and fantasy. Vargas Llosa's discomfort at the Gay Rights march, therefore, seems unfounded on the alleged grounds that it secularizes sex, if heterosexuality remains, as Foucault said of the Victorians, discreetly underrepresented in political arenas. (More obviously threatening is the notorious incident of Lorena Gallo, who castrated an abusive husband.)⁵⁸ The uneasiness, perhaps, hovers around homoeroticism itself—not around a loss of intimacy but around a loss of shame.

The shameful sexual perversity in Lituma is, as I said, an irreversible step toward the ultimate perversion, as physical contact translates into a more perverse “communion”; the baneful banquet of blood and flesh from sacrificial bodies. “‘Everyone had communion and, although it disgusted me, I did too,’ said the worker, stumbling over himself, ‘That's what's screwing me up. The mouthfuls I swallowed.’”⁵⁹ The cult's bartending and prostituting priests are Dionisio and Adriana, declensions of their Greek namesakes, as the town named Naccos is a corruption of Naxos⁶⁰ and perhaps a hint of Soccos, site of a massacre by the police in 1983.⁶¹ The explicit analogies between one primitive cult and another call to mind Garcilaso's comparison between the heathen prehistories of both Europe and Peru. We should not be surprised, he says, by the spottiness or by the fabulous quality of founding Incan fictions. Are not the first murmurs of Old World civilization equally faint, and their fables just as laughable?⁶² In both the Greek and the pre-Incan cases, barbarous practices of cannibalism and promiscuity were what civilization had wisely conquered. The problem for Lituma is that heathen remnants remain. The detective story ends with the frustration of having learned too much, enough to know that horror outstrips any hope of overcoming it. “I regret having been so stubborn about finding out what happened to them. Better to have stayed suspicious.”⁶³ Knowing, it should be noted here, is dangerous for the detective himself in Lituma's epistemological trap. His is a tale of self-preservation. How different this is from the epistemological problem that plagues El hablador. There, knowledge was threatening to neutralize difference, to cannibalize the “primitive” Other into the insatiable sameness of modernity. The danger was ethical in nature, worrying about the ravages we modernizers wreak on others. For Lituma, in stark contrast, worry is self-centered in a world too imperfectly modernized.

The unhappy hero descends toward the coast and hopes not to remain haunted. The novel groans at a political impasse, but the greater effect is a sigh of fatigue. Peru's predicament is inherited, perhaps insoluble: not only did the Europeans never finish the job of consolidating the country, but the Incas failed in their preparatory work. Barbarism stubbornly persisted in “many regions never conquered by the Incas, and is still today found in many places conquered by the Spaniards,” grumbled Garcilaso.⁶⁴ In gory detail, he quotes the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera, who locates cannibalism mostly in the unconquered jungle, far away from Incan practices; but his care to distance the taste for human blood from Peru removes it suspiciously as far as Mexico, where it was a staple of urban life and possibly an influence on other urbane Indians. “They performed these sacrifices of men and women, lads and children by opening their breasts while they were still alive and plucking out their hearts and lungs. The idol that had bidden the sacrifice was then sprinkled with still-warm blood.”⁶⁵ By the time Lituma abandons the terror-breeding mountains that gobble up men in avalanches, mud slides, and demonic lusts (by the time Vargas Llosa himself leaves Peru), the authorities have to admit that they cannot gauge, or even stomach, the degree of unfinished business.

GUILTY CHOICES

The self-conscious narrator of El hablador felt far less victimized than does Lituma. The Vargas Llosa who doubled back from Florence to Peru suggested lingering complicities with an ethnic disappearing act. His country's campaigns to “reduce Indians” to civilization, in Garcilaso's language, through a history that runs from Manco Cápac's Incan foundations to Lituma's farce, pause and lose their way amid the jungle talk. Here, Vargas Llosa's writing takes a step back from the journalistic problem-solving of “Inquest in the Andes,” where he required that misfits be made to fit, and takes another step down from the Andes to the Amazon. From there, stretching our view to the limits of Peru's peripheral vision, the probing fiction of El hablador deliberately stages a coincidence between the country's polar opposites, as if they mattered most as indices of the country's humanity. But the solidary response, in this fantasy about Jews and Indians, is also a sure index of their shared danger inside paralyzed civilizations, the danger of complicity between oppressors and bystanders. Theirs (his, ours) is the guilt of passive association, of unresponsiveness, and of nonacknowledgment in Cavell's term. In the speech framed by Yad Vashem, Vargas Llosa says that Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial tells the story of

good, educated, gentle citizens of an ancient country who one day turned into wild animals, lunging at defenseless victims, or letting others do the dirty work for them, while the surprised and stupid world stared complicitously. And that is Yad Vashem's terrible accusation; it is directed against not one, but all, countries.⁶⁶

Vargas Llosa's novel of a decade later would writhe in the guilt-ridden hyper-consciousness of collusion. Novels can make these admissions with impunity, cynics may be saying. Fiction's reckless lucidity and breast-beating histrionics can act out a self-criticism that does not demand redress. If the novel turns out to have a tragic shape, it may make us suffer; but it lets us off in the end, exhausted with grief and relieved to have finished.

The essay is a different form, at least in the case of Vargas Llosa's essays about the Indian question, from the “Inquest” to his 1990 presidential campaign and afterwards. His essays take sides. The status of Indians in Peru has been perhaps the most burning question since independence, since the Spanish Conquest, in fact. It began when Quechua chroniclers contested Spanish authorities, and it continued with the rash of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century uprisings that delayed cautious Creoles from proclaiming independence. From the nineteenth century on, liberal programs in law and literature have striven to incorporate Indians, programs that produced novels such as Narciso Aréstegui's El Padre Horán (1848), Clorinda Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido (1889), José María Arguedas's classic, Los ríos profundos (1957), and culminated ideologically in the indigenized Marxism of Mariátegui's slogan Peruanicemos al Perú, the title of a posthumous collection.⁶⁷ Like the 1983 report on the “Inquest in the Andes,” Vargas Llosa's postelection essay, “Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrought, and What He Did Not” (Harper's, December 1990), takes sides to affirm the value of a coherent country. The essay reappeared as chapter 2 of A Writer's Reality (1991),⁶⁸ without the first page that had marked it as an occasional piece.

The occasion was Vargas Llosa's response to a press conference held in Madrid by “a shadowy group calling itself the Association of Indian Cultures” that was preparing acts of sabotage in Spain and throughout Latin America to protest the planned celebrations of Columbus's quincentennial conquest. The threats, for Vargas Llosa, seemed fixed on the past, misguided as “means of achieving justice, or self-determination.”⁶⁹ To him, they were obviously inspired by the same kind of fanaticism that was making Peruvian terrorists blow up their country along a Shining Path. In fact, the media blitz from Madrid continued mostly through the media, in demonstrations and in spectacular “sabotage” of celebrations. Nevertheless, and despite what he considers to be self-defeating efforts at self-determination, Vargas Llosa impugns his own Hispanicized culture for fomenting the misguided protests when he asks:

Why have the postcolonial republics of the Americas—republics that might have been expected to have deeper and broader notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity—failed so miserably to improve the lives of their Indian citizens? Even as I write, not only the Amazonian rain forests but the small tribes who have managed for so long to survive there are being barbarously exterminated in the name of progress.

(WR [A Writer's Reality], 46)

He gives no answers that could lead to reversals of the failure or to relief from guilt. “We, the westernized Latin Americans, have persevered in the worst habits of our forebears,” he continues. “We must remember that in countries like Chile and Argentina, it was during the Republic, not during the colony, that the native cultures were systematically exterminated” (WR, 35). But it is useless, concludes Vargas Llosa, to speculate about whether the Conquest was a good or bad thing (WR, 34). What is significant is simply that the Conquest happened, which is to say, in the narrative logic of things past, that it was historically necessary.

What are we to do now? This is a different kind of question from the one about redress of past sins, a question presumably suspended because it led nowhere. Pointing nowhere, in this essay, is a gesture that erases the politics of indigenous rights, including efforts to achieve autonomy, a politics that would fissure Vargas Llosa's imagined community of Peru. This putative “nowhere,” in fact, marks a dynamic somewhere in which non-Western strains of culture and politics have a distinguished national history, from the indigenous chroniclers of the Conquest through to the Indian organizations spurred by SIL's meddling. So the question of amends is silenced, along with the possibility of lessons to be learned from historical blunders. The argument skips, with no apparent textual motivation, to present programs. There is nothing to be done, Vargas Llosa concludes, but sorrowfully to choose modernization, as if Indian tradition were incapable of adaptation. Referring to the anguish scripted into El hablador, he admits, “It is tragic to destroy what is still living, still a driving cultural possibility, even if it is archaic; but I am afraid we shall have to make a choice” (WR, 37). That is, to sacrifice the Indian cultures, since they interfere with modernity's fight against hunger and need. The line of argument has made two skips: first, by eliding any consequence to the question about the West's failures regarding Indians; and second, by moving from choices that Indians face to choosing for them. Of course, Vargas Llosa had already noted that leaders of Latin American republics inherited reprehensible traits from their forebears.

Choice is the pivotal concept on which his essay turns. It is the apparently nonideological axis on which the individual can turn. In Peru, however, the words choice, individuality, and freedom are part of an abstract and inflexibly “ideological” vocabulary that paralyzes political debate, because the abstraction does not acknowledge dissent, as critics of Vargas Llosa have complained.⁷⁰ It preempts dialogue, just as the self-interpretive passages that I occasionally note in El hablador want to preclude more interpretation. In both genres, Vargas Llosa tries to fix the delicate anthropological balance between observer and participant into the noncontested collusion between witness and judge, a move that had raised suspicions about his Uchuraccay report. The collapse of ethics into pragmatics confuses authoritarian means with allegedly liberal (free-market) ends, according to William Rowe.⁷¹ What gets lost in the crush, Mirko Lauer points out, is liberalism as a form of politics that defends individual freedom.⁷² Vargas Llosa exercises his own freedom by making authoritative, enlightened, and despotic choices for others; he tends to speak for them in general. Even in the Commission's report, witnesses in Uchuraccay lose their voices to mediating “experts” who truncate sentences and translate the peasants away.⁷³

Indian words won't fit into the “official” nation, Vargas Llosa laments. “Perhaps there is no realistic way to integrate our societies other than by asking the Indians to pay that price” (WR, 36). Personal freedom is at the heart of Western culture, and it was the magic charm that allowed a handful of willful Spaniards to topple Amerindian empires, according to Vargas Llosa. Hosts of overly disciplined and suicidally obedient soldiers were at a loss for what to do after the Inca was taken hostage. Overlooking the forty years of sustained resistance, under four successive Incas,⁷⁴ Vargas Llosa alleges that, rather than run, or fight, or decide on any move at all, the Indians allowed themselves to be slaughtered. Personal initiative, as well as voluntary and self-determining capacities in the face of the unexpected, characterizes Western, or modern, subjects (WR, 29). Freedom is not only a liberating slogan from the French Revolution; it is also the voluntarism of the Conquest's most crass and criminal agents (WR, 32). Still, Vargas Llosa celebrates it as the West's greatest contribution to static and hierarchical cultures. “The first culture to interrogate and question itself, the first to break up the masses into individual beings who with time gradually gained the right to think and act for themselves, was to become, thanks to that unknown exercise, freedom, the most powerful civilization in our world” (WR, 33-34; my emphasis).

Could the skips in his argument be symptoms of bad faith? Do they recall his unacknowledged nervousness about homoeroticism? The doubt follows in the wake of inexplicable contradictions. On the one hand, if Western voluntarism was so devastating to Indians, both because they were unaccustomed to making choices and because the Spaniards insisted on choosing for them, what justifies making more sorrowful choices for others? And on the other hand, if the essay's point is to show the enabling virtues of freedom and self-determination, why do Indian initiatives seem so pointless when they write history or take over bilingual schools and establish autonomous institutions? In the absence of answers, Vargas Llosa sees no dearth of solutions.

The contradiction here is not just personal or Peruvian. It is practically constitutive of modern cultures. In the language of political philosophy, it is the disparity between (Lockean) liberty and (Rousseauian) rights to free access. To a great degree, the difference between them is what motivates modern history, its conflicts and negotiations. Emmanuel Levinas refuses to get caught up in the action. He would agree that freedom is at the core of Western culture; that is why he targets it for attack in his argument about philosophy having bulldozed alterity into sameness. Freedom, for Levinas, is not simply available for abuses, not merely given to skipping from negotiation to conquest; it is the very vehicle of abuse and recklessness. The same caution that focuses the dilemma in Vargas Llosa's novel now haunts the discussion of his essay.

Freedom has its ultimate meaning in this permanence in the same, which is reason. … That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing other limits it.

(TI, 43)

The ravages of subject-centered freedom and the raids on difference led by a tautological reason that presumes, potentially, to comprehend—literally, to contain—everything are the dangers that El hablador exposes in Peru's drive toward modernity. Vargas Llosa's programmatic pronouncements would take sides, as I said, but the unconnected dots in “Questions of Conquest” link up to show the scars of an ethical wound that had worried the narrator of his novel. Vargas Llosa's critics do not hesitate to connect those dots.⁷⁵

HALTING AND HAUNTED

The most trenchant critic of them all, however, may be the Vargas Llosa who narrates El hablador; more precisely, he is the writer who doubled himself through the novel: as the troubled tourist in Italy and as the traditional talker of the alternating chapters. Saúl asked Mario why thinking about the habladores gave him goose bumps. “‘They're a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment,’ it occurred to me to say to him. ‘Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on’” (S, 94; 92). Both narrators turned their backs on Peru: one with weariness, the other with purpose. Both know the power of narrative, even if the essayist Vargas Llosa makes bitter jokes about the connection between literature and political life after the 1990 election defeat. Is this why a possibly self-serving novelist sometimes holds back from the modernity that loosens the social grip of stories, while the essayist rushes forward to modernize? The Latin American habit of mixing fiction and reality, he banters, is one reason “why we are so impractical and inept in political matters” (WR, 25). Both storytellers could be fictional figures for the philosopher Levinas, who draws a line between the sociality of Saying and the crippling control of fixing on the Said. They know that presuming to understand the Other willfully ignores the mystery of his Saying; it razes difference and replaces it with the same.

Learn the aboriginal languages! What a swindle! What for? To make the Amazonian Indians into good Westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good Christians of the Reformed Church? Not even that. Just to wipe out their culture, their gods, their institutions off the map and corrupt even their dreams.

(S, 96-97; 95)

Vargas Llosa's novel displays the flair for self-criticism that the essays credit with dignifying Western culture. Bartolomé de Las Casas is his best example of “those nonconformists” (WR, 33) who turned their backs on adventure in order to face Indians. We know, although Vargas Llosa does not say, that blind spots obstructed Las Casas's view; they were deadly blind spots for the Africans whom Las Casas briefly suggested could replace the disappearing Indian laborers, and deadly, too, for many Indians whom he persuaded to deal peaceably with the Spaniards. Even the successful evangelizations and the liberalizing laws that he championed were, in the spirit of El hablador's radical indictment of encroachment, travesties against the Indians. His most laudable work was probably not programmatic or problem-solving; it was the published stories of devastation, so devastating for Spanish readers that many simply dismiss Las Casas as a madman or a liar. No doubt he exaggerated some things and misremembered others. But the glaring truth is that only one generation after the Discovery, so few Indians were left in the Caribbean that, to save the remnant, a man such as Las Casas would promote African slavery only to rue it later. His “fiction” confronts the facts of Conquest, even though his policies negotiated with conquerors. Las Casas was one inspiration for Andrés Bello, when the dean of nineteenth-century education advised young historians to train themselves on the personal narratives and fictionalized accounts of Latin America's past. They were truer in spirit than the professional histories.⁷⁶

The spirit of Las Casas's stories implicates his readers. No wonder some Spaniards tried to discredit him. Their entire country would become his ideal targeted reader in this question of Conquest. It almost does not matter if Las Casas himself is vindicated or condemned along with the company he kept, because the text survives as an indictment of general complicity. Instead of judging his text, readers are invited to judge themselves. Vargas Llosa's novel survives his essays in the way that Las Casas's history survives pedantry. El hablador can bring some critics to decry the author's fatalism about Amazonian cultures, so apparently doomed from the first page of the novel.⁷⁷ And some can call him cynical, alleging that the novel repeats his patronizing lament over cultures that refuse to be redeemed from primitivism and poverty, that it dismisses Indians' “utopian” efforts to plot a self-determined future.⁷⁸ One could say of Mario Vargas Llosa the novelist something like Angel Rama's comment about José María Arguedas the ethnologist: he has sometimes been overshadowed by Mario Vargas Llosa the politician. Whether unsympathetic critics complain about fatalism or about aggressive dismissal, they read the novel like formalists, from its tragic ending backward toward a general meaning.⁷⁹ Bakhtin, of course, cautioned against reading novels reductively and retrospectively, because the “genre” defies fixed forms; to fix on a novel's closure is to lose sight of its experimental risks and specificity. In literary criticism, jumping to the conclusion of novels falls into the interpretive trap about which El hablador talks endlessly. It reduces wonder to legible signs; it translates alterity into a language that we already know, and it flattens difference into sameness.

The attendant danger to interpreting the novel away, as so much predictable disaster or necessary pain, is that the reduction allows us to turn away from the book, like the disingenuous readers of Las Casas who prefer to quibble about numbers of Indians massacred and dates of devastations than to get the glaring point. And the point of Vargas Llosa's Amazonian novel, for readers who want to face it, is our general complicity with the cultural extermination campaigns. Our uncontainable modernity expands in concentric circles, turning peripheries into reflections of the center. El hablador does not simply dissolve into a tragedy that can be a mere diversion from activity, the way that classical tragedy managed to divert revolutionary rumblings into paralyzing horror and cathartic tears. Detained for many pages and fixed on visions that refuse to evaporate, readers rehearse the narrator's turn toward Peru once the country takes him hostage and refuses to let go. At the end of the novel, Mario knows that the country occupies him. Through the friend who defends particular traditions against homogenizing modernity, a vision of Peru grips Mario more powerfully than any feelings of fear or love: “It opens my heart more forcefully than fear or love has ever done” (S, 245; 234). The very last words admit that all lines of escape would be futile. The voice of the Other is ubiquitous: “But tonight I know that wherever I might wander—on the ocher stone bridges over the Arno, … I will still hear, close by, unceasing, crackling, immemorial, that Machiguenga storyteller” (S, 245-46; 235).

We have heard that voice, too, and, perhaps sullied by a sense that we cannot or will not respond to demands for respect, because cultural convivencia was never really an option for the modern West,⁸⁰ readers remain caught inside the doubled narrative of Spanish exploits and Machiguenga tradition. Unresolvable as the book is, it is in the same measure uncontainable by a tragic frame, by Shakespeare's frame for Lear, for example, which displays the impossibility of love. That play dramatizes the corrosive effect of dynamic modernity on the mystery of presence, as each of the main characters turns away from the Other's love-demanding gaze. Vargas Llosa's “Questions of Conquest” also sighs for refusals to look and to love: Peru, he says, is “an artificial gathering of men from different languages, customs, and traditions whose only common denominator was having been condemned by history to live together without knowing or loving each other” (WR, 35). The complaint repeats after Abimael Guzmán is captured in September 1992: unlike other Latin American countries, where mestizaje and middle-class mobility helped to heal historical wounds, Peru stays schizophrenic.⁸¹

El hablador performs the doubling act without diagnosing it as schizophrenia. The duality, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is a source of both concern and of hope. It can lead to dismissing indigenous otherness as inassimilable and inessential to the Peruvian body politic, a dismissal that countrymen read in Vargas Llosa's consistent carelessness about Indian cultures and lives. Instead of two souls in one body, his novel shows two faces, as one confronts the Other in an endless, but intimate, standoff. This literarily sustained confrontation also holds out a hope: the possibility of recognition—on a reading from this geographic remove—even if the promise is betrayed by the man called Vargas Llosa.

The fact is that the confrontation Vargas Llosa stages generates an unresolved tale that stops to look, learns to listen, and dares to love. It loves selflessly, through a narrator whose face is the color of an open wound. The novel stares, uncomprehendingly, perhaps, but respectfully, at the Other. A voyeur such as Malfatti ends badly here; mediated by his camera and motivated by self-interest, he is literally a victim of jungle fever. Along with him, all of us selfish visitors are contaminated by the contact. After the reading ends, however, the novel may survive, hauntingly, like the talker who will accost Vargas Llosa beyond the very last line: “… I will still hear, close by, unceasing, crackling, immemorial, that Machiguenga storyteller” (S, 246; 235). Or, like the little Jewish boy—lost in his cap and very present in his lucidity—pictures and sounds from the novel may survive to haunt a range of readers.

What do we do with a hostage imagination? This is the question that Dussel demands of Levinas. Perhaps we will plan our escape to magical cities. And maybe we'll stop there, at museums erected to the boy's memory. It may even be possible that we will pause for a while, in our translations of living areas such as Amazonia into empty, available space for more of the same modernity. Can we also imagine some creative responses to jungle talk? They would go beyond the paralyzing awe that grips Vargas Llosa the narrator, and they would break out of the brittle redundancy that dooms the Other talker. Real responses would also stop short of the cultural conquest demanded by Vargas Llosa the politician. Creativity can come after the speechlessness of first confrontations and before the murderous monolingualism of final solutions. It can come inside experiments such as El hablador, where the novelist Vargas Llosa has been engaging us, patiently, in the slippery space that moves back and forth from one permeable language to another.

Notes

1. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller, trans. Helen Lane (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989); originally published as El hablador (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987). Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as S, with English translation page numbers followed by the original Spanish-edition page numbers. Lane's translations are occasionally altered here; unless otherwise noted, all other translations are mine.

2. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162.

3. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 43. Hereafter, all references to this work are cited parenthetically as TI.

4. Francisco Ortega made this intelligent observation to me.

5. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 8-29.

6. For an excellent summary of his ideological trajectory, from socialist sympathies in the early 1960s to increasingly authoritarian postures, see William Rowe, “Liberalism and Authority: The Case of Mario Vargas Llosa,” in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 45-64. For a recent example of Vargas Llosa's conservative animus, see his editorial “Jouer avec le feu,” Le monde, Thursday, 18 May 1995, 17, where he offers his opinion that the recent confessions of the Argentine military leaders during the Dirty War makes them no more culpable than the revolutionaries who incited the army to terror.

7. The parallel with the author of the notoriously deployed slogan “Sendero Luminoso” may be surprising. Nevertheless, Mariátegui was a model for the youthful Vargas Llosa, remembered in the novel (S, 78; 76).

8. José Carlos Mariátegui, El Alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy (Lima: Amauta, 1972), 146-47 (article of 1925); and 192-93 (article of 1929). Quoted in José Guillermo Nugent, Conflicto de las sensibilidades: Propuesta para una interpretación y crítica del siglo XX peruano (Rimac: Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas-Rimac, 1991), 55-57.

9. See James Dunkerley's review, “Mario Vargas Llosa: Parables and Deceits,” New Left Review 162 (April-March 1987): 118-19.

10. Enrique Dussel and Daniel E. Guillot, Liberación Latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Bonum, 1975), 9.

11. Mario Vargas Llosa, A Writer's Reality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 37. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as WR.

12. Dussel and Guillot, Liberación, 25. “Persona is what makes a sound, and what makes a sound is the voice and the eruption of the Other in us; it does not erupt as ‘the seen,’ but as ‘the heard.’ We should no longer privilege the seen, but the heard.”

13. Ilán Stavans, Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), 31.

14. The structure repeats, as well, in Historia de Mayta and Elogio de la madrastra, as Mary Berg and José Mazzotti remind me.

15. José Mazzotti confirmed this impression in a letter of 5 April 1995. The Quechua-flavored Spanish appears—importantly, too—in José María Arguedas's Andean stories, which Professor Vargas Llosa assigns to students. “¡El Wamani está ya sobre el corazón! exclamó ‘Atok' sayku,’ mirando … Ahistá en tu cabeza el blanco de su espalda como el sol del mediodía en el nevado, brillando.” See “La agonía de Rasu-Ñiti,” in Relatos Completos (Madrid: Alianza, 1983), 140-41.

16. I am grateful for conversations with David Maybury-Lewis on these issues and for his leadership in “Cultural Survival, Inc.”

17. “Sendero Luminoso,” or the Communist Party of Peru, had been organizing and slowly building bases during the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, from its regional headquarters at the public University of Huamanga, near Ayacucho, but it launched its military campaign against the state in 1980. See David Scott Palmer, ed., Shining Path (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

18. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Homenaje a Javier Heraud, Paris, 19 mayo 1963,” Contra viento y marea (1962-1982) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983), 36-37.

19. Angel Rama, “Introducción,” in José María Arguedas, Formación de una cultura nacional indoamericana selección (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1975), ix.

20. The same speculation, though more elaborate and convincing, is in Enrique Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's ‘Inquest in the Andes’ Reexamined,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 4 (Nov. 1991): 466-504. The article was reprinted in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 181-219 (see especially 196). Subsequent references are from the latter publication. His vehicle is the caricature of Arguedas published in the Senderista newspaper El Diario (cited in Carlos Iván Degregori, “Entre los fuegos de sendery en el ejército: regreso de los pishtacos,” in Pishtacos: de verdugos a sacaojos, ed. Juan Ansión [Lima: Ediciones Taréa, 1989], 109-14): “Internationalism has to fight against magical-whining nationalism, whose fossilized remains we have had and continue to have in a chauvinist nationalism, whose promoter was none other than that writer who rejoiced in declaring himself ‘purely apolitical,’ but who, during World War II, was proud of his little Hitler moustache. His name: José María Arguedas, affable disciple and animator in Peru of North American anthropology. … Such is indiofilia zorra. …” Mayer glosses this skewed picture of anthropological intransigence with, “The image of Zuratas again!”

21. See Rafael Humberto Moreno Durán, included in Semana de Autor: Mario Vargas Llosa (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1985), 82; and Mario Vargas Llosa, José María Arguedas, entre sapos y halcones (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1978). He continues to engage Arguedas, even if it is to disengage the writer from the ideologue. For example, the entire undergraduate course he taught at Harvard University in the fall of 1992 was dedicated to Arguedas.

22. For criticism of American anthropology in Peru, see Orin Starn, “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1991): 63-91, reprinted in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, 153-80.

23. Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” 190-91. The line goes from the 1930s with men such as Julio Tello, through Luis Valcárcel (both Ministers of Education), Arguedas himself (head of the National Institute of Culture), and Mario Vázquez (designer of agrarian reform in the sixties).

24. David Stoll, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (London: Zed Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Cultural Survival Inc., 1982), 7. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as FM.

25. “The Schneils, like all the other linguists, had degrees from the University of Oklahoma, but they and their colleagues were motivated above all by a spiritual goal: spreading the Glad Tidings of the Bible. I don't know what their precise religious affiliation was, since there were members of a number of different churches among the linguists of the Institute. The ultimate purpose that had led them to study primitive cultures was religious: translating the Bible into the tribes' own languages so that those peoples could hear God's word in the rhythms and inflections of their own tongue. This was the aim that had led Dr. Peter Townsend to found the Institute. He was an interesting person, half evangelist and half pioneer, a friend of the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas and the author of a book about him. The goal set by Dr. Townsend still motivates the linguists to continue the patient labor they have undertaken” (S, 86-87; 85).

26. Mario Vargas Llosa, Historia secreta de una novela (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1968).

27. Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (winter 1989): 215.

28. Kristin Herzog, Finding Their Voice: Peruvian Women's Testimonies of War (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 145, 156.

29. Vargas Llosa's unacknowledged debt to Catholic missionaries is the subject of an angry editorial by Domiciano García Benito, superintendent of Catholic schools in the diocese of Caguas, Puerto Rico. See “Truenan contra Vargas Llosa,” El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico), 22 Feb. 1995.

30. Nevertheless, anthropologist Luis Millones expresses dismay at the novelist's careless and prejudiced portrayals of Andean culture. See Luis Millones, “Vargas Llosa y la mirada de Occidente: Lituma en los Andes,” El Peruano (Lima), “Opinión,” Wednesday, 12 Jan. 1994.

31. Sigmund Freud, “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909),” in Collected Papers, trans. Alix and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 3:376. See also “Screen Memories (1899),” in Collected Papers, 5: 52-53.

32. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 267-353. Rael Meyerowitz reminds me that this is a sweeping simplification of Cavell's position. He also approves of American “onwardness,” what Emerson calls “abandonment.” For an excellent reading of Cavell's subtle and humane balancing acts, see Rael Meyerowitz, “Welcome Back to the Republic: Stanley Cavell and the Acknowledgment of Literature,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 4 (1993): 329-52.

33. Betty Elkins de Snell, Cuentos folklóricos de los machiguenga (Yarinacocha: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1979).

34. Two recent and provocative explorations are Paul Ricouer, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

35. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 11.

36. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971; originally published by Macmillan and Company, 1967). See, for example, 208, where he quotes C. S. Lewis on the “blind alleys” pursued by readers of Paradise Lost. “How are we to account for the fact that great modern scholars have missed what is so dazzlingly simple?” (from Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost [London: Oxford University Press, 1942], 69-70). See also Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” whose very title announces a brilliant development of the theme.

37. Dussel and Guillot, Liberación, 29.

38. Reflecting later on his obsession with that role, the narrator remembers how he hounded Irish friends to introduce him to an equally untranslatable “Seanchaí: ‘teller of ancient stories,’ ‘the one who knows things,’ as someone in a Dublin bar had off-handedly translated the word into English” (S, 165; 159).

39. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83-109.

40. Mario Vargas Llosa, “En torno a los derechos humanos,” Lima, dated at the end of the essay on 19 de Setiembre [sic] de 1978. First published in Premio Derechos Humanos, 1977 (Lima: Una edición de la Asociación Judía del Peru, por encargo especial del Congreso Judío Latinoamericano, Junio 1979), 5; my translation. The speech was reprinted as “Ganar batallas, no la guerra,” in Contra viento y marea (1962-1982), 309-23.

41. Vargas Llosa, “En torno,” 6; my emphasis.

42. Vargas Llosa, “En torno,” 17.

43. I am grateful to Judith Laikin Elkin for this information on immigration and for her lucid suggestions in general.

44. When Vargas Llosa first ventures that Mascarita's deformity is felt in exclusions and allies him to the excluded tribes of the jungle, his friend answers, “Still laughing, he told me that Don Salomón Zuratas, being sharper than I was, had suggested a Jewish interpretation. ‘That I'm identifying the Amazonian Indians with the Jewish people, always a minority and always persecuted for their religion and their mores that are different from those of the rest of society … Okay … Suddenly being half Jewish and half monster has made me more sensitive to the fate of the jungle tribes than someone as appallingly normal as you” (S, 28-29; 30).

45. I thank José Mazzotti for this clear formulation.

46. Mario Vargas Llosa, Historia secreta de una novel, 8-9.

47. I am grateful to Mario Vargas Llosa for his personal generosity and attention during that conversation of 23 October 1993, during his teaching semester as John F. Kennedy Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

48. Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” 202-3. Ventura Huayhua was later removed, for “mistrial,” but not before he garnered immense popular support.

49. See Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” for documentation of the gory details, remembered, too, by Julio Ortega and José Mazzotti, and for facts that do not fit the commission's report.

50. Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” 187. See also Mario Vargas Llosa, Informe de la comisión investigadora de los sucesos de Uchuraccay (Lima: Editora Peru, 1983), 23.

51. Mario Vargas Llosa, Lituma en los Andes (Barcelona: Planeta, 1993).

52. The story of repression against Jum, a chief of the Aguaruna, is a continuous thread, from his refusal to be robbed by a local rubber boss to an Indian resistance against a soldier, and a general vengeance by the whites and mestizos. See Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1968), 49-50, 119-20, 156, 172, 231, 252-53, 271, 281-84, 324, 339-41.

    In Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? David Stoll refers to Vargas Llosa's version of these events (see 117). El hablador summarizes: “But in Urakusa, besides the copper-colored bodies, the dangling tits, the children with parasite-swollen bellies and skins striped red or black, a sight awaited us that I have never forgotten: that of a man recently tortured. It was the headman of the locality, whose name was Jum. … The ostensible reason for this savagery was a minor incident that had taken place in Urakusa between the Aguarunas and a detachment of soldiers passing through” (S, 74-75; 72-73).

53. For a responsible history in English, see Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

54. One of the anthropologists who collaborated in Vargas Llosa's commission to investigate Uchuraccay writes that the novelist should know better. See Millones, “Vargas Llosa y la mirada de Occidente: Lituma en los Andes.”

55. To Vargas Llosa's arguments about Mayta's inability to fit into society, a Brazilian interviewer repeatedly asks, “Mas por que tambén homosexual?” See Ricardo A. Setti, Conversas com Vargas Llosa (Sao Paolo: Editora Brasiliense, 1986), 59.

56. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Cruzados del Arcoiris,” in Desafíos a la libertad (Madrid: El País/Aguilar S.A., 1994), 234.

57. Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (Autobiografía) (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1992), translated as Before Night Falls: A Memoir, trans. Dolores M. Koch (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 106.

58. Mario Vargas Llosa, “El pene o la vida,” in Desafíos, 301-6.

59. Vargas Llosa, Lituma, 311.

60. I thank Mary Berg for her reading of the parallels.

61. Herzog, Finding Their Voice, 83.

62. From pt. 1 of Los comentarios reales (1609). English translations come from Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, trans. Harold V. Livermore, foreword by Arnold J. Toynbee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), bk. 1, chap. 18.

63. Vargas Llosa, Lituma, 312.

64. Vega Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, bk. 1, chaps. 11 and 13.

65. Vega Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, bk. 1, chap. 11.

66. Vargas Llosa, “En torno,” 16.

67. See Efraín Kristal, The Andes Viewed from the City: Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru, 1848-1930 (New York: P. Lang, 1987).

68. See Mario Vargas Llosa, “Novels Disguised as History: The Chronicles of the Birth of Peru,” in A Writer's Reality, 21-38.

69. Vargas Llosa, “Questions of Conquest,” Harper's, Dec. 1990, 45.

70. See Rowe, “Liberalism and Authority,” who cites and agrees with Mirko Lauer, Julio Ortega, James Dunkerley, Julio Cotler, Gerald Martin (who comes to the defense as well), and Elizabeth Farnsworth. Rowe himself points out that “along with the globalizing attitude that flattens out historical differences, the language tends to solidify into imperviousness, losing referential accuracy and analytical precision” (49).

71. Rowe, “Liberalism and Authority.”

72. Mirko Lauer, “Vargas Llosa: Los límites de la imaginación no liberal,” La República (Lima), 15 Apr. 1984, 30.

73. Mayer, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” 207.

74. In a letter to me, José Mazzotti names them: Manco Inca, Sayri Túpac, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, and Túpac Amaru I, who fought in Vilcabamba until 1572.

75. One simplified version of the impatience Vargas Llosa's novel, along with his fiction in general, elicits among educated Peruvian readers is presented by Mirko Lauer in El sitio de la literatura: Escritores y política en el Perú del siglo XX (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1989), 10, 97-119. His fundamental objection, it seems, is that the novelist fails to maintain an ethical and coherent position.

    I prefer to think of this demand for ethics in Julio Ortega's terms of holding a position that is open to doubt rather than dogmatic and orthodox. See Julio Ortega's review of El pez en el agua, “El pez en la sartén,” La Jornada (Mexico), 9 June 1993.

76. Andrés Bello, “Autonomía cultural de América” (1848), in Conciencia intelectual de América, ed. Carlos Ripoll (New York: Eliseo Torres, 1966), 48-49. An editor's note informs that the present title “has been used in various Anthologies to present this piece.”

77. See Mayer's essay, “Peru in Deep Trouble,” especially the section “Anthropological Authority,” 190-200.

78. Rowe's “Liberalism and Authority” represents this tendency (61).

79. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 3.

80. See Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics, and Nationhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

81. Mario Vargas Llosa, “El Preso 1.509,” in Desafíos a la libertad (Madrid: El País/Aguilar S.A., 1994), 153. José Mazzotti points out that it is Aníbal Quijano who coined the term “dualismo medular” to describe Peruvian society as irreconcilably diverse, so that some pieces have to be sacrificed.

I am profoundly grateful to Julio Ortega, José Mazzotti, and David Maybury-Lewis for their expert advice, for their erudition and generosity. I am also indebted to Francisco Ortega and José Ayalamacedo for their unstinting bibliographical support and to Rael Meyerowitz, Judith Elkin, and Harvey Mendelsohn for lucid readings.