Antoni Bassas' analysis: 'On the death of Vargas Llosa'

This morning, at two thirty, the family of Mario Vargas Losa reported that The writer had died at the age of 89, surrounded by his loved ones and at peace.

Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his prolific work has had millions of readers around the world, but we wouldn't be discussing it in a political analysis like this if Vargas Llosa hadn't taken a stand on the legal status of Catalan, first, and then on the Trial.

I had the opportunity to meet him personally on several occasions as a journalist, and at close range, he was always courteous and interesting, as good observers endowed with the gift of the gab tend to be. He had fond memories of the five years he had lived in Barcelona, ​​where he met García Márquez, and expressed this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, saying that at the end of Franco's regime, Barcelona was the place "where I should be." In the same speech, he said he had learned stylistic skill and narrative strategy by reading Joanot Martorell, whom he placed alongside Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann. He cited two other Catalans, Carme Balcells and Carles Barral, as people who decisively helped him further his career. However, despite his knowledge of Catalan reality and everything he learned and received in Catalonia, in 2008 he signed the Manifesto for the common language, a kind of "Catalan thing has gotten out of hand." He sympathized with Ciutadans and the PP, and when it came to the Process, he stated that "an independent Catalonia would be a much smaller, very marginal country, governed by fanatics."

What an irony. If Barcelona was the place to be in the 1970s, if anti-Franco sentiment was more alive here than in Madrid, if connection with France and the European avant-garde was easier from here, why was it if not because of Catalanism, then synonymous with freedom and the desire for democracy? Vargas Llosa was, therefore, ungrateful to Catalonia, belligerently ungrateful, as we saw at the demonstration on October 8, 2017. Vargas Llosa embraced the intellectual trap of Spanish nationalism, which consists of saying that nationalists are everyone else, that they are patriots. What's the difference? Vargas Llosa himself answered this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2010, with a sleight-of-hand phrase that reveals the trick. He said:

"One should not confuse blindfolded nationalism and its rejection of the other, always the seed of violence, with patriotism, a healthy and generous feeling of love for the land where one was born, where one's ancestors lived and forged the first dreams that turn into death and dying. It is not flags or anthems, but a handful of places and people that populate our memories and tinge them with melancholy, the warm feeling that, no matter where we are, there is a home to which we can return."

Who wouldn't subscribe to such words? And then, how can one ignore the existence of an aggressive Spanish nationalism, a "seed of violence," armed with an army, even? How can one deny the concept of patriotism, expressed as he puts it, to a Catalan? Today, all this is history. A literary great who took sides, embracing the easiest cause, is gone.

Good morning.