Three weeks of that fateful April 13 have passed in Lima and Mario Vargas Llosa remains a central theme in the media and the literary world. After days of speculation about the causes of his death, it has been his son Álvaro who has decided to break his silence, clarify the facts and share intimate details about the last days of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In interviews granted to newspapers ‘El Comercio’ (Peru) and ‘The nation ‘ (Argentina), Álvaro explained that his father did not suffer from leukemia, as he affirmed, but that he faced a very different health picture. «My father did not die of leukemia, a disease in which the medulla produces an excessive amount of blast. It was not his case, “he assured the Peruvian environment and added that:” What I had were very low defenses that made it prone to infections of different types. Sooner or later we knew that some infection would come that would exceed its resistance. The last pneumonia hated him and was definitive ».
With these statements, Álvaro Vargas Llosa denies the statements made by some public figures, such as Jaime Bayly, who suggested that the cause of the author’s death of ‘Los Chiefs’ had been another. “I advise not to give ears to anyone who has not had access to my father or my family,” he said.
Mario’s return to Lima, after several years of living in Spain, was motivated by a combination of emotional and medical factors. As his son revealed in conversation with ‘La Nación’, “fatigue, added to an increasingly reduced mobility, forced Mario Vargas Llosa to seek the proximity of his family.”
During the last months of his life, the author of ‘The city and the dogs’ found comfort in his Lima house, where he was surrounded by his children, grandchildren and above all, of Patricia Llosa, who would have been his greatest support despite his divorce. «We chose significant places of their novels and toured the city. For him, it was a way of remembering and reliving his own stories, ”Álvaro recalled in an interview with the Argentine media.
Regarding his last days, the firstborn of the renowned writer explained that the whole family moved to Lima to accompany him. «We all converge in Lima to be by his side … We walked by car and in a wheelchair, we read poems and fragments of novels, we put concerts of classical music, we told him things about his works, of our lives. We attended their health urgencies and, in the final moments, there were in the family who were encouraged to sing Creole music, because auditory sensitivity is the last thing that is lost, ”he told ‘El Comercio’.
Finally, Álvaro revealed that his father was aware that his death was approaching. “He was aware of the deterioration in the last stage and so much in it made resigned comments, with a certain black humor,” said his son. In his last moments, already semi -inconscious, he was accompanied by readings aloud, Sonatas de Beethoven, compositions of Mahler and farewell words. I told the ear in a moment: “I would have preferred to leave before you, ‘” he confessed.
