Harsh Times

by Mario Vargas Llosa

Genres: Literary Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Guatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

Release date: November 23, 2021

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 304

Sample

I



MISS GUATEMALA’S MOTHER came from a family of Italian immigrants named Parravicini. After two generations, the surname was shortened and Hispanicized. When the young jurist, law professor, and attorney Arturo Borrero Lamas asked for the young Marta Parra’s hand in marriage, rumors started circulating in Guatemala’s high society because, to all appearances, this offspring of Italian tavern keepers, bakers, and pastry chefs failed to measure up to the status of the handsome young man whose venerable family, professional prestige, and fortune made him the favorite of all the well-bred girls of marrying age. With time, the gossip died down, and when the wedding was held in the cathedral, officiated by the city’s archbishop, nearly everyone who mattered was in attendance, some as invited guests, others as onlookers. The eternal president, General Jorge Ubico Castañeda, was there, arm in arm with his gracious wife, in an elegant uniform spangled with medals, and amid the multitude’s applause, they had themselves photographed with the bride and groom standing before the facade.

With regard to descendants, the marriage was an unfortunate one. Martita Parra became pregnant each year, but however much she took care of herself, she only gave birth to a series of skeletal boys who emerged half dead and succumbed in a matter of weeks or days, in spite of the best efforts of the city’s midwives, gynecologists, and even witches and shamans. After five years, these endless frustrations abated, and Martita Borrero Parra came into the world. Even in the crib, she was beautiful, lively, and vivacious, and they nicknamed her Miss Guatemala. Unlike her brothers, she survived. And how!

She was born scrawny, nothing but skin and bones. What people noticed, even from those very early days when they were having Masses said for the newborn so her fate would be different from her brothers’, was the smoothness of her skin, her delicate traits, her big eyes and that tranquil gaze, firm and penetrating, which settled on people and things alike as though determined to engrave them in her memory for all time. A disconcerting, frightening stare. Símula, the K’iche’ Maya Indian who would be her nursemaid, prophesied: “This child will have powers!”

Miss Guatemala’s mother, Marta Parra de Borrero, got little joy from her daughter, the only one of her children to survive. Not because she died soon afterward—no, she would live to ninety and end her days in a nursing home with little idea of what was going on around her—but because, after the girl was born, she was left weary, mute, depressed, touched (as they used to say then to speak euphemistically of the mad). She spent whole days immobile at home, not uttering a word; her maids Patrocinio and Juana fed her by hand and massaged her to keep her legs from atrophying; she would only emerge from her silence in occasional fits of tears that ended in exhausted oblivion. Símula was the only one she communicated with, in gestures, or else the servant simply guessed her whims. With time, Dr. Borrero Lamas forgot he had a wife; days would pass, then weeks, without his entering her bedroom to kiss her on the forehead, and every hour he wasn’t at his office, pleading before the court, or giving classes at San Carlos University he devoted to Martita, whom he fussed over and adored from the day of her birth. The girl grew up by her father’s side. On the weekends, when his home was filled with highborn friends—judges, landholders, politicians, diplomats—who came to play rocambor, a card game popular a century before, he would let Martita run free among his guests. Her father liked to watch how she pinned his friends in her verdigris eyes, as if determined to extract from them some secret. Anyone could pat or tickle her, but with the exception of her father, she was reluctant to respond with a kiss on the cheek or any other show of affection in return.

Later, recollecting those first years of her life, Martita had hardly any memory—as if it were a flame that flared up and died out—of the political turmoil that overtook the conversations of those gentlemen who came by on the weekends to play a card game from another era. She heard confused acknowledgments, around 1944, of the unpopularity of General Jorge Ubico Castañeda, the grandee strewn with medals and gold braid, and now civilian and military movements and student strikes were working to depose him. They achieved this in the famous October Revolution of that same year, when another military junta rose up, presided over this time by General Federico Ponce Vaides, whom the protestors would overthrow in turn. Then, at last, there were elections. The upper-crust devotees of rocambor were terrified that Professor Juan José Arévalo might win; he had just returned from exile in Argentina, and the men said his “spiritual socialism” (what might that mean?) would bring catastrophe to Guatemala: the Indians would raise their heads and start killing decent people, the communists would take over the landholders’ fields and would send the children from good families off to Russia to be sold as slaves. When they said these things, Martita would always wait for the reaction of one of the good men who attended these weekends filled with rocambor and political gossip: Dr. Efrén García Ardiles. He was handsome, with bright eyes and long hair, and he often laughed, calling his fellow visitors paranoid cavemen. In his judgment, Professor Arévalo was more of an anticommunist than any of them, and his “spiritual socialism” was merely a symbolic way of saying that he wished to make Guatemala into a modern, democratic country, lifting it out of the poverty and feudal primitivism it was mired in. Martita remembered the arguments that arose: the patricians browbeat Dr. García Ardiles, calling him a red, an anarchist, a communist. And when she asked her father why that man was arguing with all the rest of them, her father would respond: “Efrén is a good doctor and an excellent friend. It’s too bad he’s harebrained, and a leftist!” This made Martita curious, and she decided one day to ask Dr. García Ardiles what it all—leftism and communism—was about.

By then she was attending the Colegio Belga-Guatemalteco (Congregation of the Holy Family of Helmet), where all the finer families of Guatemala sent their girls to be educated by Flemish nuns, and she was winning awards for academic excellence and getting top marks on her exams. It was no great effort for her, she just needed to concentrate a bit, drawing on her abundant natural intelligence, knowing that As on her report card would bring her father great pleasure. How happy Dr. Borrero Lamas felt on the last day of school, when his daughter climbed the stage to receive recognition for her application and her impeccable behavior! And how they applauded the girl, the nuns and everyone else in the audience.

Did Martita have a happy childhood? She asked herself this many times in the years to follow, and she answered yes, if happy meant a tranquil, ordered life, without upsets, as a girl surrounded by servants and pampered and protected by her father. But the lack of a mother’s love saddened her. Only once a day—it was her hardest moment—did she visit that lady who always lay in bed and paid her no mind, even though she’d given birth to her. Símula would take the girl to give her a kiss before bed. She didn’t like this visit, the woman struck her as more dead than alive; she looked at her with indifference, offered no response to the kiss, there were times when she would even yawn through it. Martita didn’t especially enjoy her friends, the birthday parties she would attend with Símula as a chaperone, or her first dances when she was in secondary school and the boys were already flattering the girls, sending them notes and pairing off with their first loves. She preferred the weekend evenings that stretched on into the late hours and the gentlemen who played rocambor. Above all, she enjoyed her private talks with Dr. Efrén García Ardiles, whom she would pepper with questions about politics. He told her that, despite the patricians’ complaints, Juan José Arévalo was doing right, trying to finally achieve justice in the country, especially among the Indians, who were the great majority among Guatemala’s three million citizens. Thanks to President Arévalo, he said, Guatemala was finally becoming a democracy.

Martita’s life took a tremendous turn at the end of 1949, on the day she turned fifteen. The entirety of the old neighborhood of San Sebastián where she lived took part, in a way, in the celebration. Her father threw her a quinceañera party of the kind typical for daughters of the better families in Guatemala, to signify her entrance into society. The house, with its spacious vestibule, ironwork bars on the windows, and lush garden in the heart of the colonial quarter, was decorated with flowers and wreaths and filled with light. The archbishop himself held a Mass in the cathedral, and Martita attended in a white dress with tulle frilling and a bouquet of orange blossoms in her hand. The whole family was there, uncles and aunts and cousins she was seeing then for the first time. There were fireworks in the street and a huge piñata full of candies and dried fruits that the young guests fought over joyfully. The maids and waiters looked after the attendees in folk costume, the women with colorful huipils embroidered with geometric figures, pleated skirts, and dark sashes, and the men in white pants, bright shirts, and straw hats. The Equestrian Club provided the banquet and hired two orchestras, a traditional one with nine marimba players and a more modern one composed of twelve music teachers who played the dances fashionable at the time: the bamba, the waltz, blues, tango, corrido, guaracha, rumba, and bolero. In the middle of it all, Martita, the honoree, fainted while dancing with the son of the United States ambassador, Richard Patterson Jr. She was carried off to the bedroom and Dr. Galván, who was there to accompany his daughter, Martita’s friend Dolores, took her temperature and blood pressure and rubbed her down with alcohol. She soon regained consciousness. It was nothing, the old doctor said, a sudden drop in blood pressure, the fault of her overexcitement that day. But she spent the remainder of the evening maudlin and absent.

When the guests had gone and the night was well along, Símula approached Dr. Borrero. She whispered they should talk alone. He took her to his study. “Dr. Galván is wrong,” the servant said. “A drop in blood pressure, how ridiculous. I’m sorry to put it this way, Doctor, but it’s best I just come out with it: the girl is expecting.” Now it was the master of the house who went faint. He stumbled over to a chair; the world, the shelves full of books, spun around him like a carousel.

Despite her father’s pleas, demands, and threats of the worst punishments imaginable, Martita, showing signs of the enormous character that would take her far in life, roundly refused to say who was the father of that child now forming inside her womb. Dr. Borrero Lamas nearly lost his senses. He was deeply Catholic, sanctimonious, even, and yet he considered agreeing to an abortion when Símula, seeing his desperation, told him she could take the girl to a lady specialized in “sending the unborn to limbo.” But after turning the matter over in his mind and consulting with his friend and confessor, the Jesuit Father Ulloa, he chose against exposing his daughter to such a risk. Nor was he willing to go to hell for committing this mortal sin.

The knowledge that Martita had ruined her life tore him to pieces. He was forced to disenroll her from the Colegio Belga-Guatemalteco because the girl vomited constantly and fainted. Otherwise, the nuns would discover her pregnancy and naturally a scandal would ensue. It hurt the lawyer to realize that his daughter’s lapse would preclude her finding a suitable husband. What serious young man from a good family and with a bright future ahead of him would allow a fallen woman to take his name? Neglecting his firm and his classes, he devoted the days and nights following the discovery of his daughter’s pregnancy to trying to ascertain who the father was. No one had been courting Martita. A dedicated student, she hadn’t seemed interested in flirting with young men like other girls her age. Wasn’t that strange? Martita had never had a sweetheart. He had kept a close eye on her comings and goings outside school hours. Who had gotten her pregnant, where, how? The thing that seemed impossible at first slowly wormed its way into his mind, and he decided to confront it, at once believing and disbelieving. He loaded five bullets into his antique Smith & Wesson revolver, which he had used just a few times, for target practice at the Hunting, Sport Shooting, and Fishermen’s Club, or bored on one of the hunts his friends dragged him off to.

He showed up unannounced at the house where Dr. Efrén García Ardiles resided with his aging mother in the neighborhood bordering San Francisco. His old friend, who had just returned from the office where he passed his afternoons—he worked in the morning at San Juan de Dios General Hospital—received him immediately. He took him to a small, shelf-lined room filled with primitive K’iche’ Maya objects, masks, and burial urns.

“Efrén, you’re going to answer me a question,” Dr. Borrero Lamas said very slowly, as if he had to extract the words from his mouth one by one. “We went to school together with the Marists, and despite your eccentric political ideas, I consider you my closest friend. In the name of our longstanding friendship, I am hoping you won’t lie to me. Are you the one who got my daughter pregnant?”

He watched as Dr. Efrén García turned white as a sheet of paper. He opened and closed his mouth several times before responding. When he did, he stammered, and his hands shook:

“I didn’t know she was pregnant, Arturo. Yes, it was me. It’s the worst thing I’ve done in my life. I will never stop regretting it, I swear to you.”

“I came here to kill you, you son of a bitch, but you’re so repugnant, I can’t bring myself to do it.”

And he began to cry. Sobs shook his chest, and tears washed down his face. They were together for nearly an hour, and when they said their goodbyes in the doorway, they neither shook hands nor clapped each other on the back, as was their custom.

When he reached his home, Dr. Borrero Lamas walked straight to the bedroom where his daughter had been kept under lock and key since the day she fainted.

He remained standing in the doorway as he spoke to his daughter, in a tone that didn’t admit reply:

“I’ve spoken with Efrén and we’ve reached an agreement. He will marry you, so that the baby in your stomach will grow up with a good name, not like those whelps a dog gives birth to in the street. The marriage will be held at the estate in Chichicastenango. I will speak to Father Ulloa, who will officiate. There will be no guests. A notice will be printed in the paper, and afterward, announcements will be sent round. Up to that point, we shall go on pretending we are united as a family. Once you have married Efrén, I will not see you again, I will not concern myself with you, and I will look for a way to disinherit you. In the meanwhile, you will remain locked in this room and you will not set foot outside.”

All that he said came to pass. The rushed marriage of Dr. Efrén García Ardiles with a girl of fifteen—twenty-eight years younger than he—gave rise to rumors and innuendo that circulated back and forth and held the whole of Guatemala City in suspense. Everyone knew Martita Borrero Parra was marrying because the doctor had gotten her pregnant, and this was unsurprising, coming from a trafficker in revolutionary ideas; and everyone sympathized with the upright Dr. Borrero Lamas, whom no one had since seen smile, or go to parties, or play rocambor.

The wedding took place on a remote property of the bride’s father, a coffee farm on the outskirts of Chichicastenango, and he served as one of the witnesses; the others were workers from the fields, and since they were illiterate, they signed with an X or a simple downstroke before receiving a few quetzales in return. There was not even a glass of wine to toast to the married couple’s happiness.

Bride and groom returned to Guatemala City and went straight to the house Efrén and his mother shared, and all the good families knew that Dr. Borrero, having fulfilled his promise, would never see his daughter again.

In the middle of 1950, Martita gave birth to a boy who, at least officially, was born in the seventh month of her pregnancy.



II



“YOU’VE GOT TO TAME YOUR NERVES, one way or another,” Enrique said, rubbing his hands together. “Before I get started, these things always put me on edge. But when the moment arrives, I calm down and I take care of it, and that’s that. What about you? Does that happen with you?”

“I’m the opposite,” the Dominican said, shaking his head. “I’m nervous when I wake up, when I go to sleep, when I get out of bed. When I have to act, I’m even more nervous. Being high-strung is just my natural state.”