Last Tuesday morning, under a gray sky without gaps as Lima usually has, I arrived in a place that I knew by heart even if I had never been there: the door of the newspaper The news. I had never passed through there, even though one of the novels that supported my life as a reader and my vocation as a novelist begins precisely in that part of the city. Conversation in the Cathedralwhich Mario Vargas Llosa sometimes considered his best work (and sometimes, simply, the one that had cost him the most effort), opens with a 30-year-old journalist named Santiago Zavala, coming out of the newspaper where he writes editorials about everything, looking lovelessly at Avenida Tacna and wondering when Peru got screwed. And in doing so – by asking this question – one of the richest and most complete fictions of our language is launched, one of those novels that forever disrupts the way we citizens of Latin America understand our world. What is a Latino? He is someone who wonders, from time to time, when his country was screwed. What is a Latin American writer? He is someone who tries to answer this question through word constructions.
The idea for that visit came from the writer Verónica Ramírez, who sought the guidance of one of Lima’s great literary experts: Luis Rodríguez Pastor. And here I was thanks to them, walking like Santiago Zavala towards Plaza San Martín, passing like him through the space in front of the Hotel Crillón where a dog licks his shoes, arriving at the Zela bar like Santiago Zavala arriving to meet a colleague and asking myself, as Santiago Zavala has never asked himself, why I dedicated an entire morning to repeating the routes that a non-existent character took before imaginary things happened to him. I have never been able to justify the strange compulsion that leads me to look for the places where my favorite fictions are set, and I know very well that, for a large part of novel readers, it is an absurd mythomania. I don’t deny it, but it’s not just that. The fictions that have marked us are not just territories of the imagination, but are part of our experience in inexplicable ways, and knowing them with our own body is like returning to the spaces of our childhood: we remembered them badly or incompletely, and when we return we finally understand the greatness and meaning of what happened to us in them.
The real spaces of Conversation in the Cathedral They are, hardly predictable, different from the mental images that the words of the novel had inserted into my memory. But Lima wanted to be generous with its fetish readers, and there was the same Tacna Avenue, the same irregular and faded buildings, the same gray midday, the same stray dogs and even one of the same shoe shiners from that first page that I read so many times. But what was no longer there, what has disappeared forever, is the Cathedral. The old bar of the title is now a dilapidated facade painted dark green and broken into so many parts that you can see, under the peeling paint, the brick guts of the sad walls. Above the brass door, almost entirely covered by a graffiti white and blue navigating between hostility and innocence, a huge yellow sign announces that the property is for sale. Inside, Luis Rodríguez Pastor informs me, there are no longer even the remains of what was La Catedral: no trace of that popular place where Santiago sits to drink several beers and converse.
The place of the imagination is irrecoverable, except for a few photos that were taken of Vargas Llosa in July 1969. There he poses under the banner of the bar, in front of the immense wooden gates, under the white, well-painted arch that is now in ruins. There, at those tables that no longer exist, Santiago Zavala spends a few hours with a corpulent man who was a bodyguard for the powerful during the Odría dictatorship. Ambrosio, the man’s name is, and he makes a living by killing dogs with shovels in a city kennel. That conversation that Santiago and Ambrosio have is the backbone of the novel, the trunk of a tree of almost 700 pages from which other conversations emerge like branches and, from them, hang the scenes and memories of the dictatorship that corrupted them all, that ruined their lives. This is the enormous material of this extraordinary novel whose first drafts, according to Vargas Llosa, reached more than 3,000 pages. Carlos Barral, the editor who invented the boom As Latin American as its authors, he planned to publish the first definitive version in four large volumes; After ruthless editing, Vargas Llosa ended up reducing it to the two volumes in which the novel appeared.
Conversation in the Cathedral is probably the greatest political novel of my tradition: the Latin American equivalent of what I am The demons by Dostoevsky for the European novel. Its greatness is easy to grasp now, when time has given it the place it undoubtedly deserves, but I like to remember that good readers saw it clearly at the time of its publication. When he finished reading it, in December 1970, Álvaro Mutis wrote to Vargas Llosa: “Conversation in the Cathedral For me it was the first NOVEL of our Spanish-speaking lands. Novel in the sense that they are for me sentimental education, Anna Carenina, Shabby house OR Lost illusionsAnd then: “It is the most tremendously serious and definitive book that has been written in our lands.” I add that it is a miraculous book: because it seems almost implausible to me – due to the complexity of its architecture, the variety of its fifty characters and its knowledge of the world – that it was published by a young man of 33 years of age, even if it was the same young man who already had two wonders like The city and the dogs AND The green house. If at that moment – before having reached what Dante calls the halfway point of life – Vargas Llosa had stopped writing, what he had already written would have been enough to have a permanent place at the literary table.
During my stay in Lima, a couple of dear friends granted me another strange privilege: thanks to them I was able to see an interview that Vargas Llosa did with the painter Fernando de Szyszlo, his friend and accomplice, for a television program he directed for a couple of years. In it he asks himself, more or less, how he imagines his destiny as an artist: what he would like to do looking back from the future. To clarify the matter, Vargas Llosa says that, for example, he would have liked to write a great novel, a novel worthy of Tolstoy or Flaubert. The conversation dates back to the end of 1981. A few months before making it, Vargas Llosa had published it The war at the end of the world; While watching the interview, I got the new edition of Conversation in the Cathedralwhich I reread these days. I thought: yes, it’s true. I thought: he can rest assured.
