Vargas Llosa-Questions of Conquest

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QUESTIONS OF CON Qt1EST. L I B R A R Y ' -What Columbus Wrought, and wh;rtl'te Did Not

B y M ario Vargas Llosa

FUNDS FOR THE ENFEEBLEDThe NEA Wrangle: A No .. .Win Situation for Artists

B y Vince Passaro

RESTRUCTURING YESTERDAY'S NEWSThe Russians Write aNew History

B y Eric Foner

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. ~OZl;O U9IO-l; ••••.•.••••••• ~ •• 'HZ ~# errey,. ~ ~ ana a poem vy Margaret Atwooa on m e wages of war.



E s s A y

QUESTIONSOF CONQUEST

What Columbus wrought, and what he did not B y M ario Vargas L losa

I n Madrid not long ago, a shadowy

group calling itself the Association of Indian Cultures held a press confer-ence to announce that its members (it was not clear who these men and women might be) were preparing to undertake, in Spain and also through-out Latin America, a number of acts of "sabotage." I t is, of course, a sad fact of life that in a number of Latin American countries-in Spain aswell-the planting of bombs and the destruction of property continue to be perceived by some as a means of achieving justice, or self-determination,or, as in my country, Peru, the realization of a revolutionary utopia. Butthe Association of Indian Cultures did not seem interested in seizing thefuture. Their battle was with the past.

What are to be sabotaged by this group are the numerous quincentennialceremonies and festivities scheduled for 1992 to commemorate the epochalvoyage nearly 500 years ago of Columbus's three small caravels. The Asso-ciation of Indian Cultures believes that the momentous events of 1492should in no way be celebrated; and although I have yet to hear of other persons willing to make the point through subversion, I do know that thegroup will not lack for sympathizers.

The question most crucial to these individuals is the oldest one: Was thediscovery and conquest of America by Europeans the greatest feat of theChristian West or one of history's monumental crimes? It is a question they

ask rhetorically and perhaps will answer with violence. This is not to saythat to discuss what could have happened as opposed to what did happen isa useless undertaking: Historians and thinkers have pondered the questionsince the seventeenth century, producing wonderful books and specula-tions. But to me the debate serves no practical purpose, and I intend to stayout of it. What would' America be like in the 1990s if the dominant cul-tures were those of the Aztecs and Incas? The only answer, ultimately, isthat there is no way to know.

I have two other questions, both having to do with the conquest, and Ihappen to think that an honest and thoughtful discussion of them is astimely and urgent as any others one could pose just now about Latin Arner-

M ario Varg as Uos a 's la te st no ve l, In Praise of the Stepmother, has just been pub lish ed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This essay is adapted from A Writer's Reality, a collection

of his leCtures to be published this month by Syracuse University Press.

ESSAY 45



WHY HAVE THE POSTCOLONIAL

REPUBLICS OF THE AMERICAS

FAILED SO MISERABLY TO

IMPROVE THE LIVES OF

THEIR INDIAN CITIZENS?

4 6 HARPE R'S M AGAZ INE IDE CE M BE R 1 99 0

ica. First: How was it possible that cultures as powerful and sophisticated asthose of the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians-huge imperial cultures, asopposed to the scattered tribes of North America-so easily crumbled when encountered by infinitesimally small bands of Spanish adventurers?This question is itself centuries old, but not academic. In its answer may liethe basis for an understanding of the world the conquest engendered, a

chronically "underdeveloped" world that has, for the most part, remained incapable of realizing its goals and visions.The second question is this: 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 miserablyto improve the lives of their Indian citizens? Even as I write, not onlythe Amazonian rain forests but the small tribes who have managed for solong to survive there are being barbarously exterminated in the name of progress.

To begin to answer these questions, we must put down our newspapersand open the pages of the books that allow us to see close up the era whenthe Europeans dared to venture to sea in search of a new route to India and its spices, and happened instead on an unspoiled continent with its own

peoples, customs, and civilizations. The chronicles of the conquest form anastonishingly rich literature-a literature at once fantastical and true.Through these books we can rediscover a period and a place, much as the

readers of contemporary Latin American fiction discover

T the contemporary life of a continent. In their own way, theearly chroniclers were the first Magical Realists.

he historian who mastered the subject of the discovery and con-quest of Peru by the Spaniards better than anyone else had a tragic story.He died without having written the book for which he had prepared him-selfhis whole life and whose theme he knew so well that he almost gave theimpression of being omniscient. His name was Raul Porras Barrenechea.He was a small, pot-bellied man with a large forehead and a pair of blueeyes that became impregnated with malice every time he mocked someone.He was the most brilliant teacher I have ever had.

In the big old house of San Marcos, the first university founded by theSpaniards in the New World, a place that had already begun to fall into anirreparable process of decay when I passed through it in the 1950s, PorrasBarrenechea's lectures on historical sources attracted such a vast number of listeners that it was necessary to arrive well in advance so as not to be leftoutside the classroom listening together with dozens of students literallyhanging from the doors and windows.

Whenever Porras Barrenechea spoke, history became anecdote, gesture,adventure, color, psychology. He depicted history as a series of mirrors thathad the magnificence of a Renaissance painting and in which the deter-mining factor of events was never the impersonal forces, the geographicalimperative, the economic relations of divine providence, but a cast of cer-

tain outstanding individuals whose audacity, genius, charisma, or conta-gious insanity had imposed on each era and society a certain orientationand shape. As well as this concept of history, which the scientific histori-ans had already named as romantic in an effort to discredit it, Porras Bar-renechea demanded knowledge and documentary precision, which none of his colleagues and critics at San Marcos had at that time been able to equal.Those historians who dismissed Porras Barrenechea because he was inter-ested in simple, narrated history instead of a social or economic interpreta-tion had been less effective than he was in explaining to us that crucialevent in the destiny of Europe and America-the destruction of the IncaEmpire and the linking of its vast territories and peoples to the Westernworld. This was because for Porras Barrenechea, although history had tohave a dramatic quality, architectonic beauty, suspense, richness, and awide range of human types and excellence in the style of a great fiction,



~HAT IS THE PROFOUND

EXPLANATION FOR THAT DEFEAT

FROM WHICH THE INCA

POPULATION NEVER RECOVERED?

THIS WAS NOT A PRIMITIVE

SOCIETY MADE UP OF

BARBARIC TRIBES

teaches more about the innocence, fanaticism, and stupidity of the timethan the wisest of treatises.

As long as one knows how to read them, everything is contained in these pages written sometimes by men who hardly knew how to write and whowere impelled by the unusual nature of contemporary events to try to com-municate and register them for posterity, thanks to an intuition of the privilege they enjoyed, that of being the witnesses of and actors in eventsthat were changing the history of the world. Because they narrated theseevents under the passion of recently lived experience, they often related things that to us seem like naive or cynical fantasies. For the people of the

time, this was not so; they were phantoms that credulity, sur-

T prise, fear, and hatred had endowed with a solidity and vitalityoften more powerful than beings made of flesh and blood.

he conquest of the Tawantinsuyu-the name given to the Inca Em- pire in its totality-by a handful of Spaniards is a fact of history that evennow, after having digested and ruminated over, all the explanations, wefind hard to unravel. The first wave of conquistadores, Francisco Pizarro .and his companions, was fewer than 200, not counting the black slaves

and the collaborating Indians. When the reinforcements started to arrive,this first wave had already dealt a mortal blow and taken over an empire that had ruled pver at leasttwenty million people. This was not a primitive soci-ety made up of barbaric tribes, like the ones the Span-iards had found in the Caribbean or in Darien, but acivilization that had reached a high level of social,military, agricultural, and handicraft developmentthat in many ways Spain itself had not reached.

The most remarkable aspects of this civilization,however, were not the paths that crossed the four suyus, or regions, of the vast territory, the temples and fortresses, the irrigation systems, or the complex ad-ministrative organization, but something about whichall the testimonies of the chronicles agree. This civi-lization managed to eradicate hunger in that immenseregion. It was able to distribute all that was produced in such a way that all its subjects had enough to eat.Only a very small number of empires throughout thewhole world have succeeded in achieving this feat. ,Are the conquistadores' firearms, horses, and armor enough to explain the immediate collapse of this Incacivilization at the first clash with the Spaniards? It istrue the gunpowder, the bullets, and the charging of beasts that were unknown to them paralyzed the.Indi-ans with a religious terror and provoked in them thefeeling that they were fighting not against men but

against gods who were invulnerable to the arrows and slings with whichthey fought. Even so, the numerical difference was such that the Quechuaocean would have had simply to shake in order to drown the invader.

What prevented this from happening? What is the profound explanationfor that defeat from which the Inca population never recovered? The an-swer may perhaps lie hidden in the moving account that appears in thechronicles of what happened in the Cajamarca Square the day Pizarro cap-tured the last ruler of the. empire, Inca Atahualpa. We must, above all,read the accounts of those who were there, those' who lived through theevent or had direct testimony of it.

At the precise moment the Inca emperor is captured, before the battle begins, his armies give up the fight as if manacled by a magic force. Theslaughter is indescribable, but only from one of the two sides. The Span-

iards discharged their harquebuses, thrust their pikes and swords, and

4 8 HARPE R'S M AGAZI NEI DECE MBE R 1 99 0



charged their horses against a bewildered mass, which, having witnessed the capture of their god and master, seemed unable to defend itself or even to run away. In the space of a few minutes, the army, which defeated

Prince Huascar, the emperor's half brother, in a battle for

Trule, and which dominated all the northern provinces of theempire, disintegrated like ice in warm water.

he vertical and totalitarian structure of the Tawantinsuyu was with-out doubt more harmful to its survival than all the conquistadores' firearmsand iron weapons. As soon as the Inca, that figure who was the vortextoward which all the wills converged searching for inspiration and vitality,the axis around which the entire society was organized and upon whichdepended the life and death of every person, from the richest to the poor-est, wascaptured, no one knew how to act. And so they did the only thingthey could do with heroism, we must admit, but without breaking the1,001 taboos and precepts that regulated their existence. They let them-selves get killed ..And that was the fate of dozens and perhaps hundreds of Indians stultified by the confusion and the loss of leadership they suffered when the Inca emperor, the life force of their universe, was captured right

before their eyes. Those Indians who let themselves be knifed or blown upinto pieces that somber afternoon in Cajamarca Square lacked the abilityto make their own decisions either with the sanction of authority or indeed against it and were incapable of taking individual initiative, of acting witha certain degree of independence according to the changing circumstances.

Those 180 Spaniards who had placed the Indians in ambush and werenow slaughtering them did possess this ability. It was this difference, morethan the numerical one or the weapons, that created an immense inequal-ity between those civilizations. The individual had no importance and vir-tually no existence in that pyramidal and theocratic society whoseachievements had alwaysbeen collective and anonymous-carrying the gi-gantic stones of the Machu Picchu citadel or of the Ollantay fortress up thesteepest of peaks, directing water to all the slopes of the cordillera hills by

building terraces that even today enable irrigation to take place in the mostdesolate places, and making paths to unite regions separated by infernalgeographies.

A state religion that took awaythe individual's free will and crowned theauthority's decision with the aura of a divine mandate turned the Tawan-tinsuyu into a beehive-laborious, efficient, stoic. But its immense power was, in fact, very fragile. lt rested completely on the sovereign god's shoul-ders, the man whom the Indian had to serve and to whom he owed a totaland selfless obedience. It was religion rather than force that preserved the people's metaphysical docility toward the Inca. It was an essentially politi-cal religion, which on the one hand turned the Indians into diligent ser-vants and on the other was capable of receiving into its bosom as minor gods all the deities of the peoples that had been conquered, whose idolswere moved to Cuzco and enthroned by the Inca himself. The Inca religionwas less cruel than the Aztec one, for it performed human sacrifices with acertain degree of moderation, if this can be said, making use only of thenecessary cruelty to ensure hypnosis and fear of the subjects toward thedivine power incarnated in the temporary power of the Inca.

We cannot call into question the organizing genius of the Inca. Thespeed with which the empire, in.the short period of a century, grew from itsnucleus in Cuzco high in the Andes to become a civilization that embraced three quarters of South America is incredible. And this was the result notonly of the Quechua's military efficiency but also of the Inca's ability to persuade the neighboring peoples and cultures to join the Tawantinsuyu.Once these other peoples and cultures became part of the empire, the bu-reaucratic mechanism was immediately set in motion, enrolling the newservants in that system that dissolves individual life into a series of tasks

and gregarious duties carefully programmed and supervised by the gigantic

THOSE INDIANS WHO LET

THEMSELVES BE BLOWN UP INTO

PIECES LACKED THE ABILITY

TO MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS

EITHER WITH THE SANCTION

OF AUTHORITY OR INDEED

AGAINST IT

E SS AY 49



THE COLONIAL SOCIETY

WOULD GIVE WAY,AS THE INCA

CULTURE COULD NOT, TO THE

CREATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL

AS THE SOVEREIGN SOURCE

OF VALUES BY WHICH SOCIETY

WOULD BEJUDGED

SO H A R P E R 'S M A G A Z I N EI D E C EM B E R 1990

network of administrators whom the Inca sent to the farthest borders. Ei-ther to prevent or to extinguish rebelliousness, there was a system called mitimaes, by which villages and people were removed en masse to faraway places where, feeling misplaced and lost, these exiles naturally assumed anattitude of passivity and absolute respect, which of course represented theInca system's ideal citizen.

Such a civilization was capable of fighting against the natural elementsand defeating them. It was capable of consuming rationally what it pro-duced, heaping together reserves for future times of poverty or disaster.And it was also able to evolve slowly and with care in the field of knowl-edge, inventing only that which could support it and deterring all thatwhich in some way or another could undermine its foundation-as, for example, writing or any other form of expression likely to develop individ-ual pride or a rebellious imagination.

It was not capable, however, of facing the unexpected, that absolutenovelty presented by the balance of armored men on horseback who as-saulted the Incas with weapons transgressing all the war-and-peace patternsknown to them. When, after the initial confusion, attempts to resist start-ed breaking out here and there, it was too late. The complicated machinery

regulating the empire had entered a process of decomposition. Leaderlesswith the murder of Inca Huayna Capac's two sons, Huascar and Atahualpa,the Inca system seems to fall into a monumental state of confusion and cosmic deviation, similar to the chaos that, according to the Cuzcansages,the Arnautas, had prevailed in the world before the Tawantinsuyu wasfounded by the mythical Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo.

While on the one hand caravans of Indians loaded with gold and silver continued to offer treasures to the conquistadores to pay for the Inca's res-cue, on the other hand a group of Quechua generals, attempting to orga-nize a resistance, fired at the wrong target, for they were venting their furyon the Indian cultures that had begun to collaborate with the Spaniards because of all their grudges against their ancient masters. At any rate,Spain had already won the game. Rebellious outbreaks were always local-ized and counterchecked by the servile obedience that great sectors of theInca system transferred automatically from the Incas to the new masters.

Those who destroyed the Inca Empire and created that country called Peru, a country that four and a half centuries later has not yet managed toheal the bleeding wounds of its birth, were men whom we can hardly ad-mire. They were, it is true, uncommonly courageous, but, contrary to whatthe edifying stories teach us, most of them lacked any idealism or higher purpose. They possessed only greed, hunger, and in the best of cases a cer-tain vocation for adventure. The cruelty in which the Spaniards took pride,and the chronicles depict to the point of making us shiver, was inscribed inthe ferocious customs of the times and was without doubt equivalent to

that of the people they subdued and almost extinguished.

B Three centuries later, the Inca population had been reduced

from twenty million to only six.

ut these semiliterate, implacable, and greedy swordsmen, whoeven before having completely conquered the Inca Empire were alreadysavagely fighting among themselves or fighting the pacifiers sent againstthem by the faraway monarch to whom they had given a continent, repre-sented a culture in which, we will never know whether for the benefit or the disgrace of mankind, something new and exotic had germinated in thehistory of man. In this culture, although injustice and abuse often favored by religion had proliferated, by the alliance of multiple factors-amongthem chance-a social space of human activities had evolved that was nei-ther legislated nor controlled by those in power. This evolution would produce the most extraordinary economic, scientific, and technical devel-opment human civilization has ever known since the times of the cavemen

with their clubs. Moreover, this new society would give way to the creation



of the individual as the sovereign source of values by which society would be judged.

Those who, rightly, are shocked by the abuses and crimes of the con-quest must bear in mind that the first men to condemn them and ask thatthey be brought to an end were men, like Father Bartolome de Las Casas,who came to America with the conquistadores and abandoned the ranks inorder to collaborate with the vanquished, whose suffering they divulged with an indignation and virulence that still move us today.

Father Las Cases was the most active, although not the only one, of those nonconformists who rebelled against the abuses inflicted upon theIndians. They fought against their fellow men and against the policies of their own country in the name of a moral principle that to them was higher than any principle of nation or state. This self-deter-mination could not have been possible among the In-cas or any of the other pre-Hispanic cultures. In thesecultures, as in the other great civilizations of historyforeign to the West, the individual could not morallyquestion the social organism of which he was a part, because he existed only as an integral atom of that or-

ganism and because for him the dictates of the statecould not be separated from morality. The first cultureto interrogate and question itself, the first to break upthe masses into individual beings who with timegradually gained the right to think and act for them-selves, was to become, thanks to that unknown exer-cise, freedom, the most powerful civilization in our world.

It seems to me useless to ask oneself whether it wasgood that it happened in this manner or whether itwould have been betterfor humanity if the individualhad never been born and the tradition of the antlikesocieties had continued forever. The pages of the

chronicles of the conquest and discovery depict thatcrucial, bloody moment, full of phantasmagoria,when-disguised as a handful of invading treasurehunters, killing and destroying-the [udeo-Christiantradition, the Spanish language, Greece, Rome, theRenaissance, the notion of individual sovereignty,and the chance of living in freedom reached the shores of the Empire of the

Sun. So it was that we as Peruvians were born. And, of

A course, the Bolivians, Chileans, Ecuadoreans, Colombians,and others.

lmost five centuries later, this notion of individual sovereigntyis still an unfinished business. We have not yet, properly speaking, seen thelight. We in Latin America do not yet constitute real nations. Our con-temporary reality is still impregnated with the violence and marvels thatthose first texts of our literature, those novels disguised as history or histori-cal books corrupted by fiction, told us about.

At least one basic problem is the same. Two cultures, one Western and modem, the other aboriginal and archaic, hardly coexist, separated fromeach other because of the exploitation and discrimination that the former exercises over the latter. Our country, our countries, are in a deep sensemore a fiction than a reality. In the eighteenth century, in France, thename of Peru rang with a golden echo. And an expression was then born:Ce n' es t p as I e Perou, which is used when something is not as rich and ex-traordinary as its legendary name suggests. Well, Le Perou n'est p as Ie Perou.It never was, at least for the majority of its inhabitants, that fabulous coun-try of legends and fictions but rather an artificial gathering of men from

different languages, customs, and traditions whose only common denorni-

I N THE PRE-HISPANIC CULTURES,

THE INDIVIDUAL COULD NOT

MORALLY QUESTION THE SOCIAL

ORGANISM OF WHICH

HE WAS A PART

ESSAY 51



PERHAPS THERE IS NO

REALISTIC WAYTO INTEGRATE

OUR SOCIETIES WITHOUT

ASKING THE INDIANS TO PAY

A HIGH PRICE: RENUNCIATION

OF THEIR CULTURE, LANGUAGE,

AND BELIEFS

nator was having been condemned by history to live together withoutknowing or loving one another.

Immense opportunities brought by the civilization that discovered and conquered America have been beneficial only to a minority, sometimes avery small one; whereas the great majority managed to have only the nega-tive share of the conquest-that is, contributing in their serfdom and sacri-

fice, in their misery and neglect, to the prosperity and refinement of thewesternized elites. One of our worst defects, our best fictions, is to believethat our miseries have been imposed on us from abroad, that others, for example, the conquistadores, have always been responsible for our prob-lems. There are countries in Latin America-Mexico is the best example-in which the Spaniards are even now severely indicted for what theydid to the Indians. Did they really do it! We did it; we are theconquistadores.

They were our parents and grandparents who came to our shores and gave us the names we have and the language we speak. They also gave usthe habit of passing to the devil the responsibility for any evil we do. In-

stead of making amends for what they did, by improv-ing and correcting our relations with our indigenous

compatriots, mixing with them and amalgamatingourselves to form a new culture that would have beena kind of synthesis of the best of both, we, the west-ernized Latin Americans, have persevered in theworst habits of our forebears, behaving toward the In-dians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesas the Spaniards behaved toward the Aztecs and theIncas, and sometimes even worse. We must remember that in countries like Chile and Argentina, it was dur-ing the republic (in the nineteenth century), notduring the colony, that the native cultures were sys-tematicallyexterminated. In the Amazon jungle, and in the mountains of Guatemala, the exterminatingcontinues.

It is a fact that in many of our countries, as in Peru,we share, in spite of the pious and hypocritical indig-enous rhetoric of our men of letters and our politi-cians, the mentality of the conquistadores. Only incountries where the native population was small or nonexistent, or where the aboriginals were practicallyliquidated, can we talk of integrated societies. In theothers, discreet, sometimes unconscious, but very ef-fective apartheid prevails. Important as integration is,the obstacle to achieving it lies in the huge economic

gap between the two communities. Indian peasants live in such a primitiveway that communication is practically impossible. It is only when theymove to the cities that they have the opportunity to mingle with the other

Peru. The price they must pay for integration is high-renunciation of their culture, their language; their beliefs, their traditions and customs,and the adoption of the culture of their ancient masters. After one genera-tion they become mestizos. They are no longer Indians.

Perhaps there is no realistic way to integrate our societies other than byasking the Indians to pay that price. Perhaps the ideal-that is, the preser-vation of the primitive cultures of America-is a utopia incompatible withthis other and more urgent goal-the establishment of societies in whichsocial and economic inequalities among citizens be reduced to human, rea-sonable limits and where everybody can enjoy at least a decent and free life.In any case, we have been unable to reach any of those ideals and are still,as when we had just entered Western history, trying to find out what we areand what our future will be.

If forced to choose between the preservation of Indian cultures and their

5 2 HARPE R'S M AGAZ INE IDE CEM BER 1 99 0



complete assimilation, with great sadness I would choose modernization of the Indian population, because there are priorities; and the first priority is,of course, to fight hunger and misery. My novel The Storyteller is about avery small tribe in the Amazon called the Machiguengas. Their culture isalive in spite of the fact that it has been repressed and persecuted since Incatimes. It should be respected. The Machiguengas are still resisting change,

but their world is now so fragile that they cannot resist much longer. Theyhave been reduced to practically nothing. It is tragic to destroy what is stillliving, still a driving cultural possibility, even if it is archaic; but I am afraid we shall have to make a choice. For I know of no case in which it has been possible to have both things at the same time, except in those countriesin which two different cultures have evolved more or less simultaneously.

But where there is such an economic and social gap, mod-

O ernization is possible only with the sacrifice of the Indiancultures.

ne of the saddest aspects of the Latin American culture is that, incountries like Argentina, there were men of great intelligence, real ideal-ists, who gave moral and philosophical reasons to continue the destruction

of Indian cultures that began with the conquistadores. The case of Domin-go F. Sarmiento is particularly sad to me, for I admire him very much. Hewas a great writer and also a great idealist. He was totally convinced thatthe only way in which Argentina could become modem was through west-ernization; that is, through the elimination of everything that was non-Western. He considered the Indian tradition, which was still present in thecountryside of Argentina, a major obstacle for the progress and moderniza-tion of the country. He gave the moral and intellectual arguments in favor of what proved to be the decimation of the native population. That tragicmistake still looms in the Argentine psyche. In Argentine literature thereis an emptiness that Argentine writers have been trying to fill by importingeverything. The Argentines are the most curious and cosmopolitan peoplein Latin America, but they are still trying to fill the void caused by the

destruction of their past.This is why it is useful for us to review the literature that gives testimonyto the discovery and the conquest. In the chronicles we not only dreamabout the time in which our fantasy and our realities seem to be incestuous-ly confused. In them there is an extraordinary mixture of reality and fanta-sy, of reality and fiction in a united work. It is a literature that is totalizing,in the sense that it is a literature that embraces not only objective reality but also subjective reality in a new synthesis. Thedifference, of course, isthat the chronicles accomplished that synthesis out of ignorance and na-ivete and that modem writers have accomplished it through sophistica-tion. But a link can be established. There are chronicles that are especiallyimaginative and even fantastic in the deeds they describe. For instance, thedescription of the first journey to the Amazon in the chronicle of Gaspar deCarvajal. It is exceptional, like a fantastic novel. And, of course, GabrielGarcia Marquez has used themes from the chronicles in his fiction.

In the chronicles we also learn about the roots of our problems and thechallenges that are still there unanswered. And in these half-literary, half-historical pages we also perceive-formless, mysterious, fascinating-the promise of something new and formidable, something that if it ever turned into reality would enrich the world and improve civilization. Of this prom-ise we have only had until now sporadic manifestations-in our literatureand in our art, for example. But it is not only in our fiction that we muststrive to achieve. We must not stop until our promise passes from our dreams and words into our daily lives and becomes objective reality. Wemust not permit our countries to disappear, as did my dear teacher, thehistorian Porras Barrenechea, without writing in real life the definite mas-terwork we have been preparing ourselves to accomplish since the three

caravels stumbled onto our coast. _

I WOULD BE IN FAVOR

OF ASSIMILATION AND

MODERNIZATION, BECAUSE THE

FIRST PRIORITY IS TO FIGHT

HUNGER AND MISERY

ESSAY 53

Vargas Llosa-Questions of Conquest

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