Spanning thirty years of writing, Making Waves traces the development of Mario Vargas Llosa's thinking on politics and culture, and shows the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, and the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path; brilliant engagements with towering figures of literature like Joyce, Faulkner, and Sartre; considerations on the dog cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt's knife, and the failures of the English public-school system.
Spanning thirty years of writing, Making Waves traces the development of Mario Vargas Llosa's thinking on politics and culture, and shows the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, and the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path; brilliant engagements with towering figures of literature like Joyce, Faulkner, and Sartre; considerations on the dog cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt's knife, and the failures of the English public-school system.
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Overview
Spanning thirty years of writing, Making Waves traces the development of Mario Vargas Llosa's thinking on politics and culture, and shows the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, and the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path; brilliant engagements with towering figures of literature like Joyce, Faulkner, and Sartre; considerations on the dog cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt's knife, and the failures of the English public-school system.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429922609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 01/18/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 370 |
| File size: | 678 KB |
About the Author
Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 "for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt and defeat." Peru's foremost writer he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and The Storyteller. He lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
Making Waves
By Mario Vargas Llosa, John King
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1996 Mario Vargas LlosaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2260-9
CHAPTER 1
The Country of a Thousand Faces
The city where I was born, Arequipa, is located in an Andean valley in the south of Peru. It is well known for its clerical and rebellious spirit, its lawyers and volcanoes, its clear sky, the flavour of the prawns and its regionalism. Also for la nevada(the snowfall), a kind of fleeting neurosis that affects its inhabitants. One fine day, the mildest of Arequipans refuses to acknowledge a greeting, spends hours brooding, behaves in the most extravagant nonsensical way and tries to throttle his best friend over a simple disagreement. No one gets worried or annoyed because everyone knows that this man is suffering from 'the snowfall', and that tomorrow he will be back to his normal, gentle self. Although my family took me away from Arequipa when I was one and I have never lived there since, I feel very much an Arequipan, and I also think that the jokes that are made all over Peru at our expense – we are known as arrogant, unpleasant and even mad – are the result of jealousy. Don't we speak the purest Spanish in the country? Don't we have that architectural wonder, Santa Catalina, a cloistered convent where some five hundred women lived during the Colonial period? Haven't we been the setting for the most grandiloquent earthquakes and the greatest number of revolutions in Peruvian history?
From ages one to ten, I lived in Cochabamba, Bolivia. With regard to that city where I was innocent and happy, I remember not so much the things that I did and the people that I knew, but rather the books that I read: Sandokan, Nostradamus, The Three Musketeers, Cagliostro, Tom Sawyer, Sinbad. Stories of pirates, explorers and bandits, romantic love and the poems that my mother hid in her bedside table (which I read without understanding anything, just for the pleasure of what was forbidden) occupied the best part of my time. And because it was intolerable that these magic books should come to an end, I sometimes invented new chapters for them, or else changed the ending. Those additions and corrections to other people's stories were the first pieces that I wrote, the first signs of my vocation as a story-teller.
As always happens with expatriate families, the fact of living abroad accentuated our patriotism. Until I was ten, I was convinced that the greatest fortune that could befall one was to be a Peruvian. My idea of Peru at that time had more to do with the country of the Incas and the Conquistadors than with the real Peru, a country that I only came to know in 1946, when my family moved from Cochabamba to Piura, where my grandfather had been appointed as Prefect. We travelled overland, with a stop in Arequipa. I remember my emotion when I reached the city of my birth and also the fuss that my uncle Eduardo made of me. He was a bachelor, a judge, and a very pious man. He lived with his servant Inocencia in the style of a Spanish provincial nobleman, tidy, methodical, growing old in the midst of very old furniture, very old portraits and very old objects. I remember my excitement when I saw the sea for the first time, in Camaná. I screamed and made a nuisance of myself until my grandparents agreed to stop the car so that I could take a dip on that wild and rugged beach. My baptism in the sea was not very successful because I was bitten by a crab. But, even so, my love at first sight with the Peruvian coast has continued. There are those who have nothing good to say about the two thousand miles of desert, scarcely interrupted by small valleys which have formed along the banks of the rivers that flow down from the Andes, to meet the waters of the Pacific. The most extreme defenders of our Indian tradition, who revile everything Hispanic, accuse the coast of being 'foreign loving' and frivolous and insist that it was a great misfortune that the centre of Peruvian political and economic life should have shifted from the sierra to the coast, from Cuzco to Lima, because it began an asphyxiating centralism which has turned Peru into a sort of spider: a country with an enormous head – the capital – and withered limbs. One historian called Lima and the coast the 'Anti-Peru'. As an Arequipan, a man from the sierra, I should side in this argument with the Andes against the maritime deserts. But if I were forced to choose between this landscape, or the Andes or the Amazonian jungle – the three regions that divide Peru longitudinally – I would probably opt for these sands and waves.
The coast was the periphery of the Inca Empire, a civilization that radiated out of Cuzco. It was not the only pre-Hispanic Peruvian culture, but it was certainly the most powerful. It extended throughout Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and part of Chile, Colombia and Argentina. In their short existence of little more than a century, the Incas conquered dozens of peoples, built roads, irrigation systems, fortresses and citadels and established an administrative system that allowed them toproduce enough to feed all Peruvians, something that no other regime has managed since. Despite this, I have never much liked the Incas. Although I am dazzled by the monuments that they left, like Machu Picchu or Sacsahuamán, I have always felt that Peruvian sadness – a notable feature of our character – was perhaps born with the Inca state: a regimented and bureaucratic society of antmen, out of which an omnipotent steamroller squeezed all traces of individual personality.
In order to maintain power over the peoples that they conquered, the Incas behaved with refined cunning, appropriating, for example, their gods and incorporating the vassal leaders into their own aristocracy. Then there were themitimaes, the transplantation of peoples, who were thrown out of their native lands and made to resettle a great distance away. The oldest Quechuan poems that have come down to us are elegies by bewildered men in foreign lands who sing of their lost fatherland. Five centuries before the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and George Orwell's 1984, the Incas manipulated the past in accordance with the political needs of the present. Each Cuzco emperor ascended the throne with a retinue of amautas or wise men, whose task it was to alter history so that it could be seen to have reached its apogee with the ruling Inca, who would be accredited from that moment with all the conquests and great deeds of his predecessors. The result is that it is impossible to reconstruct this history, which has been distorted in such a Borgesian fashion. The Incas had the quipus, an elaborate mnemonic system for recording quantities, but they had no writing and I have always been convinced by the argument that they did not want to have writing, since it would be a danger to their type of society. The art of the Incas is austere and cold, without the fantasy and skill that one can observe in other pre-Inca cultures such as the Nazca and the Paracas, which produced incredibly delicate cloaks of feathers and cloth woven with enigmatic figures that have retained their colour and charm to this day.
After the Inca period, the Peruvians had to endure another steamroller: Spanish domination. The Conquistadors brought to Peru the language and the religion that the majority of Peruvians speak and profess. But any indiscriminate glorification of the Colony is as fallacious as the idealization of the Incas. For although the Colony made Peru the head of a Vice-royalty that also encompassed territories which are today different republics, and made Lima a capital with amagnificent court and an important academic and ceremonial life, it also brought with it religious obscurantism, the Inquisition, censorship that managed to ban a literary genre – the novel – and the persecution of the unbeliever and the heretic, which, in many cases, meant the persecution of those who dared to think. The Colony led to the exploitation of Indians and blacks and the establishment of economic castes which have survived to this day, thus making Peru a country of immense inequalities. Independence was a political phenomenon which barely changed a society divided into a minority, who enjoy the privileges of modern life, and the masses who live in ignorance and poverty. The pomp of the Incas, the colonial period and the republic has not made me forget that all the regimes under which we have lived have been unable to reduce to tolerable proportions the differences that separate Peruvians, and that this stigma cannot be compensated for with architectural monuments, warlike deeds or courtly brilliance.
None of this, of course, was in my head when I returned from Bolivia. My family had biblical customs. Everyone – uncles, aunts, cousins – moved in the wake of my grandparents, who were the centre of the family. That is how we arrived in Piura. This city, surrounded by sands, was my first experience of Peru. In the Salesian school, my classmates made fun of me because I spoke like a serrano, sounding my rs and ss, and because I believed that babies were brought by storks from Paris. They explained to me that things happened in a less airborne manner.
My memory is full of images of the two years that I spent there. Piurans are extrovert, superficial, full of jokes and warmth. In Piura at that time, there was good chicha (corn alcohol) to drink, the regional dance, the tondero, was danced with grace and the relationship between cholos (mixed race) and whites was less fraught than in other places; the informality and the boisterous nature of the Piurans closed the gap between classes. Lovers serenaded under girls' balconies and suitors who met with parental opposition abducted their girlfriends: they would carry them off to a hacienda for a few days and would then – happy ending, reconciled families – celebrate the religious ceremony, with all splendour, in the cathedral. The abductions were announced and celebrated like the coming of the river which, for some months in the year, brought life to the cotton estates.
This great town, Piura, was full of incidents that fired the imagination. There was La Mangachería, an area made up of mud and reed huts, where the best chicha bars could be found, and La Gallinacera, located between the river and the abattoir. Both districts hated each other and there were sometimes pitched battles between mangaches and gallinazos. There was also the Green House, the town brothel, in the middle of the desert, which at night was full of lights, noises and unsettling silhouettes. This spot, that the Salesian Fathers thundered against, frightened and fascinated me and I spent hours talking about it, spying on it and fantasizing about what might be happening inside. This precarious wooden structure, where an orchestra from the Mangachería came to play and where men from Piura came to eat, listen to music and talk business as much as to make love – couples did that in the open air, under the stars, in the warm sand – is one of my most evocative childhood memories. From this memory The Green House was born, a novel that deals with the disturbances that the opening of a brothel causes in the life and imagination of Piurans, and also with the exploits of a group of adventurers in the Amazon. Here I tried to bring together two regions of Peru – the desert and the jungle – which were as distant as they were different from each other. Memories of Piura were also the inspiration for several stories in my first book, The Cubs. When this collection of stories came out, some critics saw it as an X-ray analysis of Latin American machismo. I do not know if that is true, but I do know that Peruvians of my age grew up in the midst of this tender violence – or violent tenderness – that I tried to recreate in my first stories.
I went to Lima when I was entering adolescence and it is a city that I hated from the first moment because I was quite unhappy there. My parents had separated but were reconciled after ten years. Living with my father meant leaving my grandparents and uncles and aunts and submitting to the discipline of a very severe man who was a stranger to me. My first memories of Lima are associated with this difficult experience. We lived in Magdalena, a typical middle class district. But when I got good marks at school I went to spend the weekends – this was my reward – with an uncle and aunt in Miraflores, a much more prosperous district by the sea. There I got to know a group of boys and girls of my own age, with whom I shared the rites of adolescence. This was what was called 'having a neighbourhood', a parallel family whose hearth was the street corner and with whom you played football, smoked surreptitiously, learned to dance mambo and courted the girls. Compared to later generations, we were archangels. Young people in Lima today make love at the same time as they receive First Holy Communion and smoke their first joint of marijuana when their voices are still breaking. Our wild adventures amounted to no more than slipping into forbidden films – the ones that Church censorship classified as 'inappropriate for young ladies' – or drinking a capitán, a poisonous mixture of vermouth and pisco, in the corner bar before going to the Saturday parties where alcoholic drinks were never served. I remember a very serious discussion that the 'men' of the neighbourhood – we must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time – had about the legitimate way to kiss your girlfriend. What Giacomo Casanova chauvinistically calls the 'Italian style', or the British call the 'French kiss', was unanimously rejected as a mortal sin.
Lima was then, in the late 1940s, still a small, safe, peaceful and deceitful city. We lived in watertight compartments: the rich and well-off in Orrantia and San Isidro; the wealthier middle classes in Miraflores and the poorer middle classes in Magdalena, San Miguel, Barranco; the poor in la Victoria, Lince, Bajo El Puente, El Porvenir. Middle class children almost never saw the poor: we did not even know that they existed. They were out there, in the neighbourhoods, dangerous and remote places where, so we were told, crimes were committed. If he never left Lima, a boy from my background could spend his life under the illusion that he lived in a Spanish-speaking country made up of whites and mestizos, in complete ignorance of the millions of Indians – a third of the population – who spoke Quechua and lived completely different lives.
I was fortunate enough to break through this barrier to some degree. Now it seems like luck. But then, in 1950, it was a real drama. My father, who had discovered that I wrote poems, feared for my future – a poet is condemned to die of hunger – and for my 'manhood' (the belief that poets are always homosexuals is still to an extent widespread among certain groups), and in order to protect me against these dangers, he thought that the ideal antidote was the Leoncio Prado Military School. I spent two years in that institution. Leoncio Prado was a microcosm of Peruvian society. There were boys from the upper classes, whose fathers sent them there as if it were a reform school, middle class boys who wanted to have a career in the military and also boys from the lower classes, because the school gave grants to children of the poorest families. It was one of the few institutions in Peru in which rich, poor and middle income groups, whites, cholos, Indians, blacks and Chinese, people from Lima and the provinces, all lived together. I found the imprisonment and the military discipline, as well as the brutal and bullying atmosphere, quite unbearable. But I think that in these two years I came to know real Peruvian society, those contrasts, tensions, prejudices, abuses and resentments that a boy from Miraflores could not even suspect existed. I am grateful to the Leoncio Prado for something else: it gave me the experiences that provided the raw materials for my first novel. Time of the Hero recreates, with many inventions, of course, the life of this Peruvian microcosm. The book had a striking reception: one thousand copies were ceremoniously burned in the school square and several generals attacked it severely. One of them said that the book had been written by a 'degenerate mind' and another, more imaginatively, said that it was a novel financed by Ecuador to undermine the Peruvian military. The book was successful, but I never quite knew if this was due to its own merits or to the scandal that it provoked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Waves by Mario Vargas Llosa, John King. Copyright © 1996 Mario Vargas Llosa. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Foreword,
The Country of a Thousand Faces,
When Madrid was a Village,
Chronicle of the Cuban Revolution,
In a Normandy Village, Remembering Paúl Escobar,
Toby, Rest in Peace,
P'tit Pierre,
Hemingway: The Shared Feast,
A Visit to Buñuel,
Luis Buñuel: A Festival of Excellent Bad Films,
Simone de Beauvoir: Les Belles Images,
Sebastián Salazar Bondy and the Vocation of the Writer in Peru,
Literature is Fire,
Literature and Exile,
Socialism and the Tanks,
A Visit to Karl Marx,
Joyce's Dubliners,
The Other Oscar,
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook,
Letter to Haydée Santamaría,
Albert Camus and the Morality of Limits,
Bataille or the Redemption of Evil,
Sartre, Fierabrás and Utopia,
The Mandarin,
Isaiah Berlin: A Hero of Our Time,
Faulkner in Laberinto,
William Faulkner: The Sanctuary of Evil,
John Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer,
The World Cup, Spain 1982,
Before the orgy,
The empty pleasure,
Maradona and the Heroes,
The Story of a Massacre,
Amador receives his first important commission,
A general pleased to be reporting good news,
Through the high sierra,
The fourth sword of Marxism,
In Chacabamba, with the Argumedo family,
The Iquichanos,
In the mouth of the wolf,
The massacre,
Freedom for the Free?,
A polemic with Günter Grass,
Nicaragua at the Crossroads,
The civic opposition and the Contras,
The Church,
Is the Virgin anti-Sandinista?,
The quiet Sandinista,
My Son the Rastafarian,
The Trumpet of Deyá,
Botero: A Sumptuous Abundance,
The heritage of Latin America,
A Latin American among the classics,
Art as pleasure,
Szyszlo in the Labyrinth,
Degenerate Art,
A Fleeting Impression of Václav Havel,
Swiss Passion,
Letter to Salman Rushdie,
The 'People' and the 'Decent People': On Contemporary Peru,
The Death of Che,
Nations, Fictions,
Saul Bellow and Chinese Whispers,
Visual Contact,
The Penis or Life: The Bobbitt Affair,
The Truth of Lies,
Acknowledgements,
ALSO BY MARIO VARGAS LLOSA,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
Index,
Notes,
Copyright Page,