Mario Vargas Llosa, the legendary Peruvian writer who died last year, had a certain proclivity for book dedications.
During the twilight of his writing career, Vargas Llosa had taken up with Isabel Preysler, a woman of high society and TV personality whose past marriages had involved superstar musician Julio Iglesias, a Spanish nobleman known as the Marquis of Griñón, and Spain’s economy minister. When they began their relationship in 2015, Preysler was 64 and he was 79. It ended in 2022.
In a kiss-and-tell memoir entitled “My True Story” (Planeta Publishing) released last fall, Preysler claimed that Vargas Llosa had promised to dedicate his last novel to her. He was well known for his choice of dedications: he once had the nerve to dedicate a comic novel about his first marriage to his first wife after they had divorced. She responded by writing a book entitled: “What Varguitas Didn’t Say.”
So, when he published his final novel in 2023 (released in English just last year), it was titled in Spanish “Te Dedico Mi Silencio.” Unfortunately, the official translation of the title in English “I Give You My Silence” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28) doesn’t capture what Vargas Llosa was doing here. A more precise translation, “I dedicate my silence to you,” would have been more evocative than just a gift, because this is a writer who is saying, “and the rest is silence,” there will be no more.
But in a twist, Vargas Llosa dedicated the book to his wife, Patricia, with whom he was reconciled. It clearly seeks to sum up his immense body of work, and its themes are familiar ones: Peruvian popular culture, romantic frustration, quixotic intensity that is close to madness, the transcendence of art, the appeal of utopian and even messianic visions, the mysteries of Latin American civilization, the contradictions of humanity.
In the novel, the words “I dedicate my silence to you” are used by the genius guitarist Lalo Molfino, who inspires the quixotic Tonyo Azpilcuelta, a man obsessed with Peruvian popular music, to write a book about him as an icon of the creole music and its quality of huachaferia (a word hard to translate, but basically implies a kind of exaggerated but also ironic pretension).
I think Vargas Llosa identified with huachaferia and both characters, the alienated, conflicted musical genius with a troubled past and the manic writer on a mission to discover a musical salvation for the world. Like Vargas Llosa, Azpilcueta had a difficult relationship with his father. Both are ceaseless in writing their obsessions. The fictional character is also rejected by the same woman Molfino was in love with, a singer whose elegance contrasts with the hardworking wife whose income helped the family survive.
Azpilcueta only heard Molfino’s amazing music once. He had no other chance. The young man had trouble dealing with others, alienated band members, frustrated the woman who loved him, died alone of tuberculosis in a public hospital and was buried in a common grave.
A detail of his story, however, is interesting, especially given Vargas Llosa’s well-known alienation from the Catholic Church. When Azpilcueta goes to Molfino’s birthplace, a Peruvian coastal town called Puerto Eten, he finds out the guitarist was raised by an Italian priest, a Father Molfino, who literally found him in a trash heap on a dark night, saving his life and then raising him.
Vargas Llosa once wrote that the attempted molestation by a religious had caused him to cease believing in God. The portrait of the priest who rescues the abandoned baby indicates some spirit of reconciliation in the author. Later, Azpilcueta, sections of whose book on Molfino and popular music as the secret of integration for Latin American civilization are interspersed in the novel, comments specifically on the Catholic religion:
“The reader will wonder whether the author of these pages is Catholic himself. I must respond with a confession. Despite those hard times when I think of death and of the rats that will come to devour my body, days when dread overtakes me and I pray and feel in myself the truth of the religion the brothers at the Colegio La Sale inculcated in me, I’ve often told myself that the Bible was written for the uncultured and that no educated person can accept it blindly. Am I a believer? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.”
These are the words of a character, but they sound like the words of his creator. Vargas Llosa swung from the Marxism of his youth (he was a fan, briefly, of Fidel Castro) to a more conservative neo-liberal position where he was capable even of criticizing the Black Legend of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Azpilcueta hails the Spanish colonization for bringing both religion and unity of the Spanish language to the thousands of indigenous languages.
In character, the monomaniac historian of popular music says, “…it is a fact that human beings live better with religion than without it. Christianity gives order to barbaric disunities, and it is a common denominator for Latin American peoples, in other respects so different. And so, to the question of whether it is better that Christianity exists, I must answer in the affirmative, so long as it keeps its hands off creole music.”
There is always a concern about attributing to the author what his characters say, but I think something very interesting was happening to the Nobel Prize-winning writer as he finished his last fiction. There is a peaceful spirit about the work, reflected in Tonyo’s last meeting with the singer who was his ideal woman: peaceful, but comic and ironic at the same time. Vargas Llosa lived a great deal of his life outside of his country but created a fictional geography of almost all the parts of his diverse land. “I Give You My Silence” is the author’s valediction, revisiting Lima, the scene of his first great novels.
One of the most famous quotes of his fiction claimed a curiosity about when Peru had become so hopelessly messed up. This farewell story seems like a love letter to the author’s country. It seems to say things are not so bad, after all. He left us something to meditate on in his silence. May he rest in peace.
