After several decades of weekly journalistic dedication, the Spanish-Peruvian Nobel Prize winner in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa has said goodbye to his readers. But shortly before doing so, at the beginning of December, Don Mario saw fit to dedicate one of his last columns to the Antimemories of André Malraux, that orchestral man whom De Gaulle appointed Minister of Cultural Affairs in 1959 and who would remain in office until 1969. , when finding themselves caught in the wake of the youth outbreak in the spring of the previous year, they had to make way for a new generation.
In addition to being endless, the curriculum vitae of Malraux (1901-1976) is endless, to the point of giving the impression that he enjoyed the gift of ubiquity, since there was no war that could resist him nor any country that he had not set foot in. But what he really struggles with when considering his extraordinary life is separating truth from lies, since he was a consummate mythomaniac of himself, as well as a pathological liar, according to his biologist Oliver Todd.
He left school at the age of seventeen, because the opportunities they offered to a bright-spoken boy in a Paris in full cultural ferment were much more attractive - and profitable - than enrolling at the Sorbonne. At the age of 22 he was wandering through the Cambodian jungle on what was intended to be “an archaeological expedition” and where he was captured by the French authorities while he fled with statues that he had torn from a Buddhist temple. He was tried and convicted, but ultimately saved thanks to the intervention of some of his influential Parisian friends. The successful career of a dealer in works of art of not always explainable origin had only just begun.
Then came his participation-contribution in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans, followed by his alleged exploits against the Nazis. He tells all of this in novels full of lies and shameful exaggerations, as he had already done about his Asian travels during the 1920s. Incredible as it may seem, there were few who did not accept such bravado. In fact, decorations and invitations showered him from all sides, making him a person of international prestige.
Culture Minister Malraux's Antimemoires hit bookstores in 1967, two years before the end of the De Gaulle era. In his pages one finds nothing but hyperbole, imposture and exuberant mendacity, together, as always, with his irresistible capacity for persuasion, and he was a good writer... of fiction. As an example, a button: for many years he claimed to have met Mao in China during the twenties, when the truth was that he would not meet the Great Helmsman until 1965, in Peking, when Malraux was French minister to whom Mao granted a brief courtesy audience, which Malraux would convert in the 'Antimememories' into a kind of very high-flying dialectical exchange that sought to fly at the level of the discussions between, for example, Naphta and Settembrini in The Magic Mountain, by Tomas Mann.
Mas Malraux appeared to be a very convincing liar at all times. So much so that in 1972 he received an invitation from President Richard Nixon to visit him at the White House, on the eve of the historic meeting between the two leaders in Beijing, which Kissinger was preparing behind the scenes. What a duel of liars.
With what is falling, it is not surprising that Vargas Llosa, shortly before saying goodbye to his readers, remembered Malraux, a man of our time.
