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“Mario Vargas Llosa was a daring truth-teller. He was also my friend.”
— Marie Arana, The Washington Post
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I sent Marie Arana’s moving tribute to my sister, Bonnie, who had directed several of Vargas Llosa’s plays in Madrid and had encountered him on more than one occasion. I knew this news would strike a deeply personal chord.
“It’s clear how deeply Vargas Llosa’s death has affected you,” I wrote to her.
“You felt close to him—not only as a reader or as a playwright, but as someone whose voice accompanied you through many chapters of your life. Your grief resonates with me, because I understand what it means to lose a figure who, though not family, becomes part of our inner landscape—someone who shapes our ideas, our convictions, even our way of seeing the world.”
She replied: “the death of such a brilliant mind—so present for decades—left a void that is hard to name.” That idea moved me deeply.
“It saddens me profoundly,” I wrote back,
“to consider the silence that now follows him. I understand why this hits you so hard—perhaps because Vargas Llosa stood for the very opposite: a luminous intellect, fiercely articulate. To imagine even he is gone… it hurts.”
“I’m with you,” I added.
“And even from afar, I hold you in this grief.”
Echoes Within Our Family
These reflections stirred memories of our own family—of our father, whose cognitive decline began after a traumatic brain injury. He slowly lost his speech, his clarity, his grasp of the world around him.
And our mother, who held on much longer, also slipped away eventually—her presence fading in slow motion.
Our paternal and maternal uncles, Calixto and Fredy, experienced the same kind of long, quiet departure. Years of silence. Gradual disappearances. Losses we didn’t always know how to name, but which marked us all.
It’s a pattern I can’t overlook.
I’ve done the research. (You may not know this.) Genetically, my risk for similar decline falls in a moderate range. Not a verdict, not a guarantee—just a presence. A shadow that walks beside me, saying nothing, revealing nothing.
Sometimes I wonder whether knowing this helps or hurts.
But I choose to know.
I choose to face it.
Because if ever I find myself on that road, I want to walk it with the same dignity I saw in our parents—even in confusion, even in silence—when their eyes could still recognize us with a flicker of tenderness.
And I want you to know that.
I want us both to remember.
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Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero
April 17, 2025; in transit from Florida to Pennsylvania
Observations On Perception 