Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bumbling Towards Hell

None of us is ever prepared for what is happening in our lives; nor are the choices presented to us - political, personal, spiritual - ones that we formulate. We move randomly, provoked by half-formed dreams and aspirations; but it simply isn’t possible to foresee the consequences of each move. So we react, with even less reason than immediate desire, to circumstances as they unfold. We call the result a life, or career, or accomplishment, but it is really only a series of unplanned revolutions in our experience, our preferences, our prejudices, our politics and the way in which we harm other people. Thus one of Vargas Llosa’s main characters can say. “People change here... never things.”

The Peru of Vargas Llosa is perhaps exceptional in this regard. It is a place of ingrained racial tension - among the Spanish, the Mountain Indians, the Jungle Indians, the Blacks, the mixed race untouchables - which insures that no politics can be stable. Consequently everyone is “... in revolt against his skin, against his class, against himself, against Peru.” It is a place of domination by the Catholic Church through which personal advancement is controlled. It is a place of profoundly respected, and expected, machismo in which women have no voice and are presumed to submit in everything from sex to financial dependence. It is not therefore a happy place in which to seek one’s future. Everyone is disappointed, especially those who achieve what they believed they wanted. And revolution is more or less a way of life - personally as well as politically.

The eponymous conversations take place in a bar, a working man's dive in Lima called the Cathedral. They tell the history of a group of boyhood friends and their families as well as that of Peru. This is a history of haplessness and failed dreams - about love, about vocation, about familial loyalty, about doing the right thing - largely because each dream interferes with the others. Love confronts loyalty and leads to a politics of hate; pursuing one’s calling demands giving up whatever doing the right thing means. Dreams become nothing more than a residue of regret and fragmented, sentimental memories. As one character describes another, “You seem to have stopped living when you were eighteen years old.”

The literary technique of cutting abruptly from the personal conversation to the national history - and frequently inter-leaving up to four other conversations - can be disconcerting initially but as it becomes familiar it serves to amplify the ironies of the situation to the point of desperate sarcasm. The conflicts and incompatibilities of needs, wants, emotions become stark and obvious. As do the various forms of complicity in coercion and torture in contemporary Peruvian society.

Otherwise relatively innocuous people are drawn into a web of systematic oppression of their compatriots. The life-choice seems limited to being either oppressed or oppressor. A neutral position doesn’t exist. “Doubts were fatal,” A young idealist says, “...they paralyze you and you can’t do anything, ...[S]pending your life digging around, would that be right? torturing yourself, would that be a lie? instead of acting?” But acting, even with good intentions, means acting against others, “And in this country a person who doesn’t fuck himself up fucks up other people.” Tyrants or reformers, it doesn’t matter; all act the same with power. Power isn’t simply correlated with evil; power is the evil which is everywhere and nowhere. It transforms those who merely seek it into carriers of a morbid infection.

Unsurprisingly nothing goes the way it should for anyone, neither for those in charge nor those oppressed by those in charge. No one is reliable, even oneself; everyone evolves into a parasite on their family, friends, associates, and their own past. A transcendent demonic presence seems to infect the entire country. Indeed, the people change but things never do. This is normality in Vargas Llosa’s Peru, a profoundly hopeless normality about which nothing can be done. Santiago, the protagonist, is obsessed by the mysterious force behind his and everyone else’s failure: “All the doors open, he thinks, at what moment and why did they begin to close?”

Ambrosio, the black chauffeur of Santiago’s family, is a Horatio-like interlocutor in conversation with Santiago as Hamlet. They each reveal the facts that the other never knew about both their families’ roles in the country’s continuing misery. Santiago can only drop more deeply into despair and spiritual ennui; he is traumatized: “My whole life spent doing things without believing, my whole life spent pretending....And my whole life spent wanting to believe in something, ... And my whole life a lie, I don’t believe in anything... APRA [the Leftist Party] is the solution, religion is the solution, Communism is the solution, and believing it. Then life would become organized all by itself and you wouldn’t feel empty anymore.” Looking to fill a spiritual, social and political flaw with anything at hand seemed the only strategy.

Echoes of Trump’s America or Berlusconi’s Italy or Erdogan’s Turkey or Putin’s Russia? The political sensibilities of Vargas Llosa’s Peru seem to have become a worldwide phenomenon. Racism, unarticulated class warfare, the cooperation of religion in the service of power, seem to be the coming norms. It is difficult not to adopt Santiago’s mood of despair. Religious belief cannot create solidarity; neither can global consumerism. When did all the doors begin to close and why? Can they ever be opened again?

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