“Ok Vargas Llosa said. And we should do it as soon as possible. To put it in the number of February 5, before her speech at the Academy of France,” Belinda Saile, editor Chief of EPS wrote to me, on January 12, 2023. He had been exchanging messages with her and Borja Echevarría, deputy director of El País. I went to my study, where I remembered to have The fish in the waterChronicles of Vargas Llosa about his life, and read it before quoting with him. To an interview with such a guy, who has lived all lives and written all books and studied to all authors, you have to go alone with what is put. And I decided in a few seconds, surely remembering Juan Cruz, who does not get tired of recommending it, that I would go with the fresh reading of The fish in the water.
I have the book now with me with several marked pages. In one of them, Vargas speaks of the attacks received by an old friend, José Rosas-lribeyro, used by the leftist government; Rosas-lribeyro was heading to the editor of Vargas, Patricia Pinilla: “Tell Mario to ignore the things I declare against him, because they are only Coyuntural”In another, the definitive rupture, frost, with his father, of which days later he told me in the interview:“ The beginning was not good: I discover that he is not dead (they had made him believe during his childhood that yes). He had the idea that all writers and poets were drunk or fags: he produced real horror. ”In those pages he remembers how, after publishing Aunt Julia and the writerin which he portrays a father who acted very similar to that of his violent father, he wrote a letter to thank him for Vargas who had been very severe with him, “I have always loved you.” Time later, while talking to his mother on the phone, the father wanted to put himself on the phone to talk about Aunt Julia and the writer. Vargas hung, and days later he received a rude letter: Vargas had been a resentful slanderer, and an atheist to which divine punishment was waiting for him. In addition, the father would circulate that letter between friends and acquaintances to read the whole world, and that did: dozens, “perhaps hundreds of copies” circulated through Peru.
I remember, while reading the book, which suddenly had a cold sweat. A month earlier, on January 4, he had written a column about Vargas Llosa and Isabel Preysler in which he laughs with a news he had given ABC: It turns out that Vargas Llosa had sent him the manuscript of his latest book to Preysler, and he had replied that he did not return home, that the break was total. I interpreted it as a literary criticism, and fantasized about Isabel Preysler’s response: “So far we have arrived, this narrative is where to take it, I lose the thread, the syntax is crazy. Do not return here, Tamara is frightened.” That wrote a month before the Nobel, his work and his heartbreak. And now he would have it in front of an excuse, his historic admission to the French Academy, and a delicate mission that he reserved for the end, because it is true that there were more interesting things than asking him: that he pronounced on his breakup.
When I arrived at his famous floor of Flora Street in the center of Madrid, a huge duplex full of plants and light from which he had read in the magazines that had been “refugee” – and used the verb in my entradilla – after his exit from the preysler’s mansion, he approached me smiling and said: “You have left a beard!”. We had never seen each other or, of course, he knew anything about me, nor did I write my name every week on Google to check how it was a beard. Simply, as I confirmed later for another fact that I don’t remember, I seemed to have confused myself with someone. I waited for him to forget the confusion or, ultimately, that confusion did not hinder the talk with stories of the type “As you know, because we were together, something similar happened in Lima.” Nothing else happened. Perhaps, a call that interrupted his recording and comment: “Ah, I didn’t know you had a child,” that he woke up my curiosity about who would be confused. The truth is that, seen now in perspective, there were only two courtly comments of Mario Vargas Llosa to a nervous interviewer.
We sat in two armchairs, next to each other, and an assistant offered us to drink. “Water,” said the Nobel. I hesitated, but I decided that a wine would take me out of the stunning, because the man who had ahead, already hunched up by age, already skinny because old age surrounded him as the lions surround his prey, I had written novels that had left me face down (memory The goat party A summer in my town: I finished it and, pale, I started again to find out what had happened, how I had written that).
“I open a bottle,” said the assistant. “Do not open it, it is not necessary, I will drink water,” I said frightened, it was only necessary to undo the Bodega to the Nobel. And the voice of Vargas Llosa, 87 happy years, suddenly: “Look, don’t bring me the water, open the bottle and serve two wines.” We drank two reds. Then we drank two more. I remember how much his age impressed and the fact that he continued writing books and columns, and enduring paparazzi on the portal, so I started the interview asking him about immortality. “Being immortal would seem bored. And in the following responses, intelligent, he settled his confusion with respect to me and with respect to other historical issues (two, no more) in which he was danced clearly. “What I hate is deterioration. Human ruins. It is something terrible, the worst thing that could happen to me. For example, I have memory problems now. I had always very lucid memory. I remembered things, and I notice how it has been impoverished. Some names, for example: I see the faces, but the names have been lost to me.” And he clarified that he had a prodigious memory for very specific facts, very precise adventures and, nevertheless, other stages of his life were kept in a rare nebula.
Vargas Llosa had the red cheeks (he spoke a lot, he made efforts to remember and used humor and sarcasm, or acting as a sniper, according to the theme that was presented to him) when he approached the heaviest moment for both of us. “How does one of the pink press tunnel machine come?” “Not making any statement. I have not done any about Isabel.” I tried on the other hand, his essay The civilization of the showbut he cut with laughter: “I’m not going to talk about Isabel, at all.” He ended up saying something: “It was a magnificent, but not literary experience,” “There are two very different worlds, very separate, but well: the experience was lived and that’s it, I will be in my house again, surrounded by my books (I laugh a lot here, as I review in the recording: Rio with desire)”, “I do not regret anything, absolutely.” Although the morbidity took me on the other hand, and what I wanted to know was what Vargas never commented even in his private circle: What was the punch to García Márquez? “Women,” he just responded.
It was a pleasant conversation that continued years later by other media, already without him, thanks to my relationship with Juan Aren Madame Bovary of Flaubert with which the Nobel was photographed on the last day of 2022 on social networks). Of all of them there are images in the Hello! In Machu Picchu during a Nobel visit.
Arena, with which Vargas locked himself for a week until twice in the Leyre monastery (they sang the Gregorian songs, ate eggs with black pudding at the Landa hotel before entering), keep two shocking images of that holiday trip. One, when Vargas Llosa recited, before the Peruvian giant, the Machu Picchu’s heights, by Pablo Neruda. And in the midst of silence, those verses in their voice that begin with an immortal one: “Go up with me, brother.” And another, more descriptive, of the relationship of Mario Vargas Llosa with literature, the sick obsession with the letters. In Cuzco, a gardener who was rotting approached him, “with permission”, to discuss several aspects of Conversation in the cathedral: characters, plots, influences. Wisdom, blissful, the two spoke for half an hour of pure literature, of their rooting with reality, of the tremendous step left by the books in the lives and lives in the books, which does not end with death, much less, and that was the success, the true and most difficult success of the writer, Juan Arena thought watching the worker and the Nobel losing the notion of time: to commit us all.