‘You Don’t Know About Nobel Prize Winners’

I met Mario Vargas Llosa shortly after I began teaching at Princeton in 2002. Peter Dougherty, head of the university’s press, had written to invite me to a short meeting: “Princeton is about to publish Mario’s essay about Les Misérables, and he’ll be coming here tomorrow to talk about his book with our sales team.”

I attended the meeting, which was held in one of the university’s classrooms, and there was Mario, in a suit and tie, surrounded by the publishing house’s sales team, men and women in their 30s, 40s — all of them American — with that shyness typical of the university set. They never looked you in the eye; they spoke and moved with great trepidation, as if they didn’t know how to behave or what type of questions they should ask.

Mario, in contrast, projected a politeness and pleasantness that accompanied him wherever he went. He talked to the salespeople as if they were old friends. When he started to tell the story of his book, his voice and expression lit up the room.

“Just imagine,” Mario said. “Victor Hugo is a man who was a virgin when he married. He had never been with a woman before. That was a very rare thing for a man of his time. He was a virgin!”

The agents’ discomfort increased considerably. They were taking notes in booklets full of lined yellow paper and were doing everything possible not to look at Mario as he spoke.

“But then,” Mario continued, “something unexpected happened. On their wedding night, Victor Hugo enjoyed that new experience so much that he made love to his wife seven times.”

The sales agents kept their eyes glued to their notes and wrote more quickly.

“Seven times. Not once or twice, but seven. Seven times in just one night. Can you imagine the amount of energy one needs for that? And he was no longer a young man. Seven times!”

The sales agents blushed as they kept speedily taking notes. One woman went so red in the face that I feared she would explode.

When Mario finished relaying the life of Victor Hugo — his marriage, his political problems, his exile on the Channel Islands — the director announced there were a few minutes left for questions.

Following a long silence, the woman who had become red and now returned to a less violent color asked, “How would you classify that book? Biography or essay? It’s very important to specify so we can determine its placement in bookstores.”

While she asked this, I looked at her and remembered Mario’s words, “Seven times! Seven times!”

Shortly after, I became the director of the Latin American studies program. My first project was to invite Mario to spend a semester with us. He had already been a visiting professor at Princeton, but he had not been back since the early 1990s, just after his presidential campaign in Peru.

At Princeton, in addition, was Mario’s archive. In the 1990s, the university’s library had purchased his correspondence, the drafts of his novels, and many other documents that now fill 362 boxes. Hundreds of researchers from around the world have consulted them.

Mario accepted the invitation and since then has spent three semesters with us as a visiting professor. On one of those visits — it was fall 2010 and the campus’s trees were a fiery red — he gave a seminar on Borges’ essays and another about the Latin American novel. The semester was going along at its usual pace — seminars, dinners with colleagues, trips to New York, where many of Princeton’s professors live — when one October day, in the wee hours of the morning, I was awoken by ringing.

I picked up the phone half asleep.

“Good morning. Forgive me for bothering you so early. I’m Mary, from Princeton’s Nobel Prizes office.”

I hadn’t managed to fully wake up. Nobel Prizes office? I didn’t know there was such an office.

“We urgently need to locate Mario Vargas Llosa,” the woman’s voice told me.

I was shaken awake when I made the link between those two phrases — “Nobel Prize” and “Mario Vargas Llosa.”

I jumped out of bed. I showered and dressed as quickly as I could. Soon I was on the subway, headed toward 57th Street, where Mario had rented an apartment just steps from Central Park.

When I got to his building, I ran into a crowd of journalists and curious onlookers, armed with TV cameras and microphones, gathered at his door.

Across the street was a florist, and I went in to buy an arrangement.

“Of course,” the clerk said. “What’s the occasion? A birthday? A wedding?”

“A Nobel Prize,” I replied.

I managed — with the floral arrangement in tow — to make my way among the hordes of journalists, take one of the elevators, and arrive at Mario’s apartment. The door opened, and I found another small crowd there: more TV cameras, microphones, and reporters running back and forth across the apartment from one end to another. All phones — the intercom, landlines, visitors’ cell phones — were ringing at once, and there weren’t enough hands to answer them.

“Rubén!”

I heard my name called, and then there was Mario, impeccable and with an unwavering serenity in the midst of that Babylon-like ruckus.

“Imagine,” he said to me, “the Swedish Academy got in touch before 6 a.m. I was reading on the sofa. Patricia took the call and went pale before giving me the phone. I got very scared when I saw her, and the first thing I thought was: There’s been a death in the family. I took the receiver and a very proper gentleman said that he was from the Swedish Academy, that I’d been awarded the Nobel Prize, and that in five minutes they would publicize the news. He told me that if I wanted to talk to anyone, I should do it right then because I wouldn’t be able to later. I hung up and was left thinking, here on the sofa, about what that meant. Just five minutes later, as they had warned me, the storm began. I didn’t get to call anyone.”

The Nobel storm reached Princeton. A day didn’t go by without journalists from all over the world showing up and walking across the university’s campus as if it were their own home, even making their way into classrooms where Mario was giving his seminar.

Luckily, Rose, the program’s administrator, was an imposing Puerto Rican who, from day to night, became Mario’s bodyguard. “El dotol Vaga Llosa is not available,” she would grunt when an outsider came to the office.

Besides the inopportune visits, the office’s phones rang off the hook and the fax machines reeled off page after page. The university mailman had to get a supermarket shopping cart to deliver the pounds of letters and packages that arrived daily.

The faxes and letters contained the most unrealistic requests in the world. Mario laughed like a child upon reading those outlandish entreaties — we could hear his belly laughs from his office.

“Rose, come here for a minute so you can read this letter,” Mario would say.

In a fax — illustrated with graphics and numerical tables — the owner of an ice-cream factory in Ayacucho, Peru, addressed Mario as his “illustrious compatriot” and told him about the marvelous business his little factory was, with gains of 400 percent in the previous year. “That is why,” the ice-cream vendor explained, “I thought of proposing that you invest the Nobel money in my business. This will allow you to triple your capital in two years. You help me, and I help you.”

“Rose, look at this one,” Mario would call from his office.

A brown paper envelope, with stamps from India, came addressed only to “Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize, United States” and had miraculously arrived at the university. Inside was a sheet written in careful calligraphy and addressed to “Dear Sir.” The author told Mario that he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for being a very good writer but also surely because he was a very generous man. “And as such,” the Indian man concluded, “I ask that you send me some assistance taken out of your prize to pay for a stomach operation that doctors recommended to me long ago but that I have not been able to complete for lack of funds.”

Not all requests came in writing. One day, the manager of a fashionable restaurant came by the office, saying he wanted to take advantage of the Nobel to bring Latin food to his customers. He had thought of a large banquet of Peruvian food to which all of New Jersey’s who’s who would be invited. All of this would be presided over by Mario, and “it won’t take more than three or four hours of your time: the duration of the banquet.”

“Dotol Vaga Llosa doesn’t like banquets,” Rose grunted as she saw the manager to the door.

Four days after the Nobel Prize announcement, Mario had planned a conference, in Spanish, which would go by the title “A Brief Talk on Culture.”

The day before the conference, Mary, who was in charge of the Nobel Prize office, called me to emphatically recommend that we move the event to Richardson Auditorium, the university’s concert salon, a space that could fit up to 500 people.

“But the conference is in Spanish,” I told her. “Besides, it’s about a very specific subject. We have a room that seats a hundred, and I don’t think we’ll fill it. How many Spanish speakers could there be in Princeton?” I asked her.

“You don’t know about Nobel Prize winners,” Mary told me. “People want to see them, go up to them, touch them.”

We listened to Mary and reserved the auditorium at Richardson.

The day of the conference, we found a crowd pressed up against the entrance. There were 500 people inside and at least as many outside.

In his talk — which was later published as “The Civilization of the Spectacle” — Mario critiqued Michel Foucault and his concept of freedom, establishing a link between the French philosopher’s ideas and the anarchy experienced today in France’s public schools. It was a line of reasoning that could be read as a frontal attack on the North American academy, where Foucault’s work continues to be, after so many years, a key reference for students and professors. The discussion with the audience, I thought, would be intense.

But everyone in the room listened to Mario’s words with smiles that didn’t fade. When the moment came for questions from the audience, a long line formed.

“I’m from Iquitos,” a gentleman said, very close to the microphone, “and, although I’ve been in this country for 20 years, I’d like to tell you that the Nobel Prize is an honor for all Peruvians. It is a prize that elevates the name of our country.”

“I’m from Lima, and I work in construction,” shouted the second one in line when his turn came, pushing the microphone away, “but in my free time, well, I write poetry. And I’d like to show you some of my poems, Don Mario.”

“I cried, Mario,” a woman said, “when I saw the news about the Nobel on television. I cried because it is a source of pride for all Peruvians, one of the most beautiful things that could happen to us.”

When Mario finished signing, a security guard — a blond man in uniform who appeared to be no older than 20 — escorted us off the stage. There were too many people outside, he said, and it would be preferable to use the musicians’ exit, which would leave us out behind the building. From there, we could walk to the street, where a car would be waiting for us to take us to the restaurant at which we’d agreed to meet with the novelist Joyce Carol Oates.

We followed the guard, and when we went out the back door we heard, in the distance, the voices of the crowd gathered in front of the main entrance. From out of nowhere, a voice yelled, “There he is.” In a second, the human wave had reached us and completely surrounded us. There were hundreds, thousands of Peruvians crammed onto the campus while that blond security guard, armed with a walkie-talkie, tried to make way for us.

Where had all those Peruvians come from? Mario told me that in Paterson, a New Jersey town not too far from Princeton, there lived one of the most notable Peruvian communities abroad and that it totaled more than a hundred thousand.

“Well, it seems that all hundred thousand have come en masse to Princeton,” I thought.

“Mario! Mario! I voted for you,” one of the Peruvians shouted as we made our way forward, with difficulty.

Despite the endless requests for photos and autographs, to which Mario agreed as we kept walking, we managed to advance a few feet. The human masses became denser and denser. At that rate, it would take us hours to reach the street.

That is, if we managed to get out of there without being crushed. There came the moment that Paterson’s Peruvians closed off our path. Dozens of hands with books and cameras stretched out before us, and people were yelling, “Mario! Mario!” The blond security guard called on his walkie-talkie to say that we couldn’t move forward, that we were trapped.

At that, Mario — who continued to sign books and pose with his fans nonstop — took the lead. He walked determinedly as he greeted fans left and right with his eyes, but always facing forward. It was as if he were parting the sea with his gaze.

When we finally got to the street and entered the university car, the chauffeur took off, Paterson’s hundred thousand Peruvians behind us.

“You got scared,” Mario said to me.

“I thought they were going to trample us.”

“It was an affectionate audience, but any crowd, even an affectionate one, can be lethal. I learned that on the campaign trail.”

This essay is adapted from Conversation at Princeton by Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner — out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.