Madrid: Alfaguara. 2023. 303 pages.
Mario Vargas Llosa returns to a cherished, familiar South American territory in what he has said is his final novel, Le dedico mi silencio. Impossible to leave behind, we find him once again in Lima, the capital of Peru. The Peruvian author has mapped Lima from his earliest narrative endeavors. In the imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide, Lima is a literary space that is nearly independent of its original model—or emancipated from it, according to the Nobel laureate. This is the Lima Zavalita contemplates indifferently in Conversación en La Catedral (1969). It is the city that witnesses the journalistic and emotional debut of a young Vargas Llosa in La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977), in which, under the protection of the feverish mind of the writer, a boisterous and Balzacian mob of characters emerges from his gruesome prose and traverses the city. This is the gloomy, dystopian Lima of Alejandro Mayta, the failed revolutionary. It is a university town in El hablador (1987) and, finally, in Cinco esquinas (2016), Lima belongs to Rolando Garro and other shadowy characters.
If, in this final novel, Lima is once again chosen for the setting, so is the timeframe in which the story takes place. This novel spans the nineteen-fifties, sixties, and nineties, with the last of these decades shaken by the messianic frenzy of the Shining Path, which Ricardo Somocurcio’s uncle intuited with chilling precision before anybody else in Travesuras de la niña mala (2006). Thus, we find a familiar landscape that moves from idyllic to horrifying, from desirable, as only a childhood landscape could be, to the disenchantment and collapse of a society in decline. In this period, the entire country teetered, beleaguered by terrorism, inflation, and populism, which the author astutely describes in his memoir, El pez en el agua (1993). In that text, he offers a clear account of his political involvement, when he was a presidential candidate defeated by Alberto Fujimori—the explosive spark that bored through the foundations of Peruvian democracy, addressed in the novel Cinco esquinas.
In Le dedico mi silencio, Toño Azpilcueta is an inquisitive and unfortunate author of forgotten chronicles on Peruvian criollo music. After hearing a performance by the man he considered the world’s best guitarist, Lalo Molfino, Azpilcueta is in awe. Having heeded professor José Durand’s sage advice, Azpilcueta sheds his misgivings and goes to a party to hear the brilliant guitarist play. From that point on, the distinguished musicologist embarks on a most precipitous and costly life “mission”—to which, it appears, he sacrifices the last productive years of his creative vigor. He decides to write the biography of the eminent guitarist, whom nobody knows anything about. Adding to the mystery, Molfino dies of tuberculosis and in poverty while still a young man, right after leaving such an impression on Azpilcueta. The writer’s inquiries take him to the north of the country, specifically to Puerto Eten, where he follows vague clues pointing to the guitarist’s particularly ominous life: as a baby, Molfino was rescued from a garbage dump full of rats and cockroaches and adopted by an Italian priest who gave the child his family name. Bullied by his schoolmates, the boy grows up with few relationships and a single obsession—an old guitar he devotes himself to and which transforms him into an unparalleled virtuoso. However, he also becomes obsessive, vain—perhaps aware of his immense talent—and is incapable of relating to anybody. His fellow musicians hate him, and he is doomed to be both a genius and a social pariah. Only one person seems to love Molfino, a young woman Azpilcueta meets and interviews when she is no more than a beggar on the street. Yet, her love is unrequited because Molfino is unable to give her more than a few innocent caresses.
Vargas Llosa returns to his habitual counterpoint technique to tell Toño Azpilcueta’s story. Into the narrative, he inserts what at first appears to be his musical diary, but which we later discover are pages of his book.
Soon, Toño Azpilcueta believes he sees characteristics in the guitarist’s biography that reverberate in his own, since he too is the son of an Italian, despite his Basque last name. He is also terrified of rats and, at a deeper level, also feels misunderstood, defeated, and broke, despite being a true scholar of Peruvian criollo music. And he is frustrated in love, too, which is not an insignificant detail. Lalo Molfino had always been in love with the singer Cecilia Barraza. She happens to be Toño Azpilcueta’s friend and confidant, who listened to his sorrows and remained the object of his secret affections. It was Molfino, in fact, who said to Barraza before leaving her band: “Le dedico mi silencio” (I dedicate my silence to you), the enigmatic phrase that serves as the novel’s title. Barraza had to fire the guitarist because he stirred up trouble and butted heads with the other musicians, Cecilia tells Azpilcueta over breakfast at Bransa, which is another location frequented in Vargas Llosa’s novels.
Once again at Bransa, Azpilcueta talks with the would-be editor of his book. His work keeps growing and growing, an apparently unhinged and endless work in progress—isn’t this true of all Romanticism?—in which the author explains the history of criollo music first, and then Molfino’s life, and finally a history of Peru. According to Toño Azpilcueta’s now mad proposition, the only thing that will right Peru’s wrongs, its class and ethnic prejudices, are valsecitos. This is a type of music that has a particularly Peruvian sort of pretension, known in Peru as huachafería. He suggests that valsecitos link the upper, middle, and lower classes. They unite people—mixed-race, black, white—and populations living along the country’s coasts, in the highlands, and jungles. These are communities so distinct and wary of one another that, according to Azpilcueta, they reiterate all the negative aspects of the nation.
Contrary to expectations, the book’s first edition sells very well. The editor rushes Azpilcueta into publishing a second edition and implores the persnickety author to limit his “additions,” please. But Azpilcueta keeps writing, fattening up a book that turns into an indescribable, hefty volume. It is disproportionately ambitious and plummets into the abyss of a totalizing and omnivorous thesis on Peru. The project veers the hapless editor toward economic collapse, and the author toward emotional collapse. Azpilcueta is portrayed in the vein of Vargas Llosa’s typical “visionary”: Pedro Camacho, Mayta, Pantaleón, Antonio Consejero, Casement, Mascarita, etc. These are all obsessive, frenetic, misunderstood individuals, who are focused on one sole mission in life.
Vargas Llosa returns to his habitual counterpoint technique to tell Toño Azpilcueta’s story. Into the narrative, he inserts what at first appears to be his musical diary, but which we later discover are pages of his book. Here we see the Nobel prize winner’s long-held and well-known reflections: Peruvian valsecitos, which Zavalita hated; politics and corruption; bullfighting; huachafería; the sublimation of a nonexistent, stately Lima by the power of criollo music; and, finally, the misfortune of an alienated nation that lacks social and emotional connections. Much like Pedro Camacho, Azpilcueta is a writer who sacrifices everything for his passion—in this case, music—and ends up a victim of his own obsessions. This novel is a true swan song to Peru, a country incapable of resolving its deepest conflicts.
Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
