Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

by Roberto Bolaño

  But Mujica Láinez’s great surprise was yet to come, and that surprise is Bomarzo. Published in 1962, the novel won Argentina’s National Literature Prize and then the John F. Kennedy Prize in 1964, shared with Cortázar’s Hopscotch (or Rayuela), which (as Marcos Ricardo Barnatán reminds us) gave Mujica the idea of publishing both novels in a joint edition under a single title, either Ramarzo or Boyuela.

  My generation, it goes without saying, fell in love with Hopscotch, because it was exactly what we needed, our salvation, and we only read Bomarzo years later, almost as an exercise in archeology. Despite what we expected, we didn’t emerge unscathed, among other things because no one or almost no one can emerge unscathed from reading any book, much less if it’s the more than six hundred pages of Bomarzo, a happy novel, or a novel that will make any reader happy, and that will teach the young writer absolutely nothing. The life and adventures of the Duke of Orsini, his thousand adventures and countless mishaps and feats, are a stage for the unfolding of a kind of writing, an art of storytelling, that at once recalls the classics of the nineteenth century and introduces apocryphal luxuries of the sixteenth century, the century of the monstruous and angelic Orsini.

  At first glance Bomarzo seems to be a novel of conflict, a novel of survival, a historic novel, a novel of intrigue, a bodice-ripper. It may in fact be all those things. But it’s also many other things: it’s a novel about art and a novel about decadence, it’s a novel about the luxury of writing novels and a novel about the exquisite uselessness of the novel. Between the lines, it’s also Mujica Láinez’s commentary or playful epilogue on himself and his family. And of course it’s also a novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around, although in the latter case there’s always the risk that the children will flee en masse.

  After Bomarzo Mujica didn’t have much left to say. He traveled frequently and in high style all over the planet. He wrote De milagros y melancolías [Of Miracles and Sorrows] and El gran teatro [The Great Theater], with what appeared to be the greatest of ease. And before he died, in 1984, at the age of seventy-four, he had time to write the 500-page novel El escarabajo [The Scarab] (1982), which tells of the vicissitudes of the possessors of an Egyptian talisman through time, and which is an intelligent, well-written work, pleasing to read (possibly pleasing to write), with measured doses of humor, suffering, and travel. A happy novel, like most of his books.

  Two Small Novels by Mario Vargas Llosa

  THE CUBS, AGAIN

  Among the books I read in my youth, I remember four short novels written by authors who mostly wrote long novels, four novels that years later still retain all of their original explosive charge, as if after exploding on a first reading they had exploded again on a second and a third and so on, without ever being depleted. Beyond question, they are perfect works. All four are about defeats, but they turn defeat into a kind of black hole: the reader who ventures in will emerge trembling, ice-cold or dripping with sweat. They are perfect and they are caustic. They are precise: the hand that wields the pen is that of a neurosurgeon. And they are also a celebration of movement: the speed at which they move was something unprecedented at the time in Spanish-language literature. These novels are García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, Julio Cortázar’s The Pursuer, José Donoso’s Hell Has No Limits, and Vargas Llosa’s The Cubs.

  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the four authors knew each other and were friends, that each kept a curious eye on what the others were writing, and that these four books were written, if I’m not mistaken, in the 1960s (though The Pursuer may date from the 1950s), a prodigious decade for Latin Americans, with all the good and bad implied by that adjective.

  From these four novels (if their authors had written nothing else, which isn’t the case), one could create a literature. Of the four, The Cubs is probably the most caustic, the most fiendishly paced, and the one in which the voices — the multiplicity of forms of speech — are most alive. It’s also the most complicated, at least from a formal perspective. The first version was written in 1965, that is, when Vargas Llosa was twenty-nine, the youngest of the Boom authors; the definitive version dates from 1966 and was originally published by Lumen with photographs by Xavier Miserachs. On the surface, The Cubs couldn’t be simpler. In a variety of voices, from a variety of angles (one is tempted to say torsions, maneuvers performed by the writer that often become practical and masterful demonstrations of the many things that can be done with the Spanish language), it tells the story of the life of P. P. Cuéllar, an upper-middle-class boy from Lima, and the story is told in the voices of his childhood friends, boys like P. P. Cuéllar, residents or citizens of the Lima neighborhood of Miraflores, a place that leaves its stamp on these future lords of Peru.

  But P. P. Cuéllar has an accident that will mark him for the rest of his life and make him different: the novel is the exploration of that difference, a collective attempt to explain Pichula Cuéllar’s progressive distancing from his peers until they are light years apart, a horror tale mixed with social realism. The distance between them, incidentally, is something that oscillates, that shrinks and grows, because Cuéllar may gradually become estranged from his peers but that doesn’t mean he stops trying to be part of the group, and his efforts to draw near are more painful, more revealing of the overall picture, than his radical distancing. His descent into hell, told in cries and whispers, is in a sense a foretelling of the narrators’ own descents into another kind of hell. In fact, what terrifies the narrators is that P. P. Cuéllar is one of them and that he never stops trying to be one of them, and it’s only fate that makes him different. In his difference, the narrators can see themselves in their true guises, the hell to which they could have been relegated and weren’t.

  Anomaly is unbearable, although after the destruction of Cuéllar the storytelling voices find themselves faced with the flatness of adulthood, the quiet devastation of their bodies, the hopeless and complete acceptance of a bourgeois mediocrity from which Cuéllar has removed himself through horror, a price doubtless too high to pay and yet the only possible price, as the young Vargas Llosa at moments seems to suggest.

  I previously mentioned the speed of The Cubs and its three twin sisters. I made no mention of their musicality, a musicality based on colloquial speech, on the voices that punctuate the story, and that are woven through by the speed of the text. Speed and musicality are two constants in The Cubs and in some way this brilliant exercise in speed and musicality serves Vargas Llosa as a practice run for the novel he would write soon afterwards, one of his great works and one of the best Spanish-language novels of the twentieth century: Conversation in the Cathedral (published in 1969), whose bold, original structure bears a strong resemblance to that of The Cubs.

  Vargas Llosa’s first book was The Leaders. Among the stories in it is one that features the first appearance of Sergeant Lituma, who pops up like a chameleon throughout Vargas Llosa’s fiction; other stories are about the loose ends of a betrayal, the cruel joke of an old man, a double duel, a local tyrant. All are cold and objective. All show glimpses of a desperate pride.

  THE PRINCE OF THE APOCALYPSE

  The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, like almost all of Vargas Llosa’s novels (except for his erotic fiction), lends itself to more than one or two readings. It can be read as the dream-turned-nightmare of some poor naïve youths and it can also be read as the relentless unfolding of a nightmare that to everyone’s surprise becomes gradually mor
e bearable, more ordinary, less sad, and more inevitable. It’s also possible to read it — because of its structure and thesis or subject matter — as a footnote to Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece Conversation in the Cathedral, and it can even be read as a note or additional study or growth on another of his great works, The War of the End of the World, a novel which, read today, seems — at least to me — more revelatory than Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Vargas Llosa himself recommends to us as an aide to understanding the clash between East and West, between civilization and barbarism.

  Of course, it can also be read as a portrayal of a certain cultural and social age, Latin American as well as Peruvian, dating from the first armed struggles in the name of revolution (and therefore Enlightenment) in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the era of the Shining Path and the millenarian guerrillas in the 1980s, during which — especially in Peru — the thing that came to be known as the Latin American terror was unleashed.

  The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta plunges us into the worst of times. The guerrillas are advancing everywhere, sweeping everything away, the representatives of the right as well as those of the non-dogmatic left, against a backdrop that resembles certain paintings by Brueghel or an alien invasion. The scene is broadly sketched, to be sure, but in no way implausible. The citizens of Lima live in something like a state of permanent siege, and extreme violence is exercised not only by the millenarian guerrillas but also by the Police and the Army and also the death squadrons. In the midst of this chaos, a writer or a reporter, possibly Vargas Llosa or possibly not, decides to write the story of the first Peruvian guerrilla movement, founded in 1958, even before Fidel Castro seized power.

  This is where Mayta comes in, and the portrait of Mayta is perhaps Vargas Llosa’s greatest achievement in this novel. Mayta isn’t a boy, but he acts like a boy, or in other words he lingers in a kind of deliberate adolescence, though one can’t say whether it’s intentionally sought or accepted with resignation. Objectively speaking, Mayta is maladjusted, but he isn’t violent or manipulative, much less a nihilist. Mayta belongs to a Trotskyist party with seven members, a splinter group of a Trotskyist party of twenty, but before that he belonged to the communist party and before that to the anti-imperialist, Marxist-influenced APRA, and he left each because of his natural tendency toward dissent and doubt. Mayta would like to shower every day but there’s no shower in the room that he rents and he has to content himself with going to the public baths once every three days. Mayta is fat and no one would call him attractive and he’s also gay at a time when being gay in Peru and Latin America was seen as despicable deviant behavior.

  As a result, Mayta hides his homosexuality, especially from his comrades (because in matters of sexuality the Left and the Right march in lockstep in Latin America, like Siamese twins), and he sublimates it or crushes it under a mountain of propaganda work or activism or quartermaster duties that he takes on with the patience of a saint. To a great extent, that’s what Mayta is: a modern-day saint, tempted by the devil in the desert, whose commitment to others (or his pure faith) is so great that it seems monstrous.

  That alone would make this a memorable novel. But there’s more: the young lieutenant who inspires Mayta, a naïve and impetuous leader whose fragility, sensed from the very beginning as a mambo or bolero plays, is conveyed in strokes that signal the end of innocence; Mayta’s recycled comrades and their different accounts of him; the small stories that the reporter gathers and that seem extraneous to the novel but that taken together weave a rich narrative web; the story of Professor Ubilluz, a model of the provincial Latin American intellectual; the composition of the novel, which is so much like a puzzle pieced together in the abyss; Vargas Llosa’s sense of humor, which leaps, in Balzacian fashion, even over his own political convictions; political convictions that give way in the face of literary convictions, which is something that only happens to real writers. And finally the kindness and compassion — which others might call objectivity — that Vargas Llosa shows his own characters.

  Notes on Jaime Bayly

  There are words in Bayly’s novels that pop up all the time but still seem mysterious to me. Sassy for example. I’ve always wanted to know exactly what that means. In Bayly’s novels I understand it, of course, but not entirely. And his characters are always sassy§§! As often as they’re spoiled rotten¶¶, which is an activity to which all of Bayly’s characters devote themselves wholeheartedly: in his books everyone is spoiled rotten or tries to be spoiled rotten by other people or is spoiled rotten by the wrong people and, on top of it all, at the worst possible moment.

  There’s a scene in Yo amo a mi mami [I Love My Mommy], the last scene in the Annie chapter, that gives us a good sense of Bayly’s talent as a storyteller. In this scene Jimmy and his mother are driving to the airport to say goodbye to Annie, who is going to live in the United States. The scene begins with Jimmy asking his mother to take him to the airport. His mother makes him beg. She says that first she has some exercises to do (aerobic, though possibly also spiritual), then she’ll take a shower, and after that she’ll drive him. Suddenly, time is short and mother and son get in the car and speed off. The way from their house in a suburb called Los Cóndores to the airport is a drive through Latin American impossibility, that is: through the desert, through the barren spaces of a continent with no exit. The description of Jimmy’s mother’s car and of the highway is like a mirage projected by other mirages.

  Along the way not much happens. Jimmy’s mother accelerates, but she accelerates in third, because a lady never uses fourth gear. At a certain point they hit a dog. When they get to the airport a policeman wants to see Jimmy’s mother’s brevete — I assume that brevete means driver’s license — and she doesn’t have it and she ends up bribing the policeman by the expeditious method of buying him all the numbers in an imaginary lottery. By then Annie and her parents are already in the departure lounge and Jimmy can only say his goodbyes from the terrace, with waves and shouts. Strangely, the one who shouts most is Jimmy’s mother (Annie’s mother was her best friend, and for reasons beside the point the friendship has been deteriorating) and in this woman’s exaggerated cries we suddenly glimpse all her fear, her warmth, and her frustrations.

  Where does Bayly come from? At first glance his literary antecedents are clear. Bayly comes directly from Vargas Llosa, especially from Conversation in the Cathedral, a novel that is, among many other things, an extremely comprehensive sampler of Peruvian Spanish. Vargas Llosa’s ear finds in Bayly’s ear its most talented disciple. Yo amo a mi mami, on the other hand, reminds me of Bryce Echenique’s A World for Julius. Of course, Vargas Llosa’s prose is weightier than Bryce Echenique’s, though the weightiness of the latter isn’t insignificant. Bayly shares with Bryce the impulse to launch himself headlong, leaving the formal plotting of the novel for later, or for right this minute, to be embarked upon in the very act of writing: Bryce and Bayly are devourers of blank pages. This isn’t the only thing they have in common: they both possess an apparently incorrigible sense of humor, they’re both autobiographical writers (or so it seems, though it doesn’t pay to trust some autobiographies), both have English last names, which is saying a lot in a country like Peru, and both are “men and sentimental,” as the song goes.

  Of course, there are things that make them different and even distance them from each other, but I don’t think this is the moment to make an inventory of those dissimiliarities. In fact, another similarity occurs to me: tenderness,
a kind of compassionate gaze that some see in Bryce but refuse to see in Bayly. About Baylian compassion, however, which is sometimes disguised as fierceness and cynicism, I’ll have more to say later.

  A clarification, possibly unnecessary. One has to be very brave to write about homosexuality in Peru. One has to be very brave to write from homosexuality in Peru. Especially if one does it without begging the pardon of anyone, whether of those on the Right or those on the Left, who in these matters are as identical as two peas in a pod, which should lead us to the conclusion that the Left isn’t the Left it claims to be, though the Right really is the Right.

  A while ago, talking to Jesús Ferrero, I was told the story of a trip he took to Guatemala. Ferrero arrives in Guatemala, gets a taxi since no one has come to pick him up at the airport, and heads into the strange city. Night is falling and the streets flow into each other as if the taxi were moving through a labyrinth, the effect magnified by the darkness and the public lighting, which we should presume deficient or possibly excessive. Suddenly the taxi driver stops, whether confused or frightened we don’t know, to consult a map of the city and Ferrero looks out the window at a group of transvestites gathered around a fire in the middle of a side street. This is it, says the driver: you can get out here. Ferrero gets out with his suitcase in his hand, and is left alone in the middle of the street without another soul in sight. The taxi leaves and the fiercest transvestites in the world come up to him. They’re Indians or mestizos. Indians, yes, or urban mestizos swept into the capital by the country’s convulsions. They’re prostitutes in the bodies of raped men. They’re men in strange bodies and in a strange city that they try vainly to remake in their own image: an alien city within a Central American capital with a bloody past. In any case, they look nothing like European transvestites. They are to European transvestites what a velociraptor is to a heron. And these barbarians moved in on Ferrero like urban guerrillas, they circled him, surrounded him, cut off any possible escape routes, and then, when things looked blackest for the novelist, they began to talk to him, exchanging remarks about colonial architecture, for example, or about Guatemala City’s maze of streets, and they ask him where he comes from, and then, with a graciousness that I can only call Mayan graciousness or pre-Colombian courtesy, they show him the right way to go, and they even walk with him for a while, because at that time of night and in that part of the city everything is dangerous, though for them nothing is dangerous.