Years ago, I was left
untouched when I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.
Call it youthful absorption in my own love life or lack of it, but the promise
of love requited at seventy did not offer comfort. Also, the names in the book had
the slant, throwing quality of the foreign arrayed in the familiar, not unlike…
Malay food to an Indian palate? Having grown up in newly decolonized India I
got Anglo-Saxon names, and the influx of Russian translations during the cold
war era made Vanya and Nikolai, Masha and Aksinya, familiar. But I found it
difficult to engage when a Maria befriended a Pilar, or when a
can-get-my-head-around-it Florentino cavorted with a hitherto unknown Fermina.
In fact I do not
remember a word of the book, except that I was very impressed by how it ended.
Marquez was one of the first Nobel laureates I read leaving aside Tagore, so
maybe I willed myself to simply ‘finish’ the book – that was my mantra those
days. You could put down my lack of response to my youth and lack of literary
inclination (my staples were Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie). But then I
picked up ‘Memory of my melancholy whores,’ last week, and found myself reacting
against the graphic depiction of older men having sex with emotionally
untouched, subordinate women. These things do not stop me from going on with a
book, but I do not necessarily have to endorse them. Give me Nabokov’s
extravagant lyricism or Coetzee’s economy and precision, if we need to deal
with the politics of sex from a certain angle, but please do not subject me to explicit
illustrations of unsavoury sex in fantastical settings. I do not like it. (Case
in point: the Pedro Aldomovar film I watched recently, with an execrable,
horrible premise. The only reason I watched it to the end was to see the
demented wicked die. ‘In Your skin’ or something. Do not watch it.)
But reading Marquez boosted
my sense of well-being. I was whale-shit at the bottom of the ocean that was
the trading room, but the other fish were single young men, many of them groovy
and gagging for it. Also, if 2008 marked the end of big bonuses, 1994
definitely marked their beginning in India, and reading authors from South
Africa and Colombia was my way of adding the suhaaga to the sona. (Old
Punjabi saying – sone pe suhaagaa – probably
means ‘the clinching good thing on top of a good thing’. Kapish? Never mind.) Overall, I was happier swinging from Bombay
locals to work than I could have reasonably been expected to be, and I owe some
of it to my reading Marquez when I got a seat. Except the day I rushed into the
Malad 8:08, unobservant of reeling women rushing out. I called out to my friend-
what incredible luck, I had two window seats facing each other- we could now
converse as I dipped into the book a la Jolie-Depp in The Tourist, except that
instead of the gorgeous European countryside rushing by, we would catch lines
of men squatting down to do their business by the tracks (maybe the women took
the first shift, but eight in the morning?), except we did not know Angelina Jolie
those days but where was I? I am brought down to earth by the soft squish of
the very large pile of yellow shit I had stepped onto. It was spongy and
yielded at once; the smell stayed with me for days. I had to be miles away in
time and space and read Katherine Boo’s ‘Beyond the Beautiful Forevers’ before
I could see that it need not have been a malevolent prank. One could tire of
jostling to crap.
Oh yes, so I have
always felt guilty about not really reading Marquez, who was selected in the
first place on account of his renown and his coming from somewhere far off.
When Leena suggested tia Julia by Mario Llosa Vargas, the other Nobel laureate
from Sudamerica, I jumped at the
chance to read it for our day group. I am glad I did.
I am addicted to Roman a clefs. For those who do not wish
to Wikipedia that, a roman a clef literally means (in French at least) a novel
with a key. It refers to real events/characters, settings etc. presented as
fiction. The relationship between the real and the fictionalized elements is
the key of the novel. All autobiographical novels would be roman a clefs –
Naipaul’s ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’, R.K. Narayan’s trilogy, Roy’s ‘God of Small
Things’ are all roman a clefs as they have strong autobiographical elements.
But there are other variations too, like “The Green Carnation” which was
loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter is a Roman a clef, as it follows the life of Mario Vargas himself.
It tells the story of young Marito or Varguitas, a law student who works part
time at a radio station and dreams of becoming a writer. The ups and downs of
his love affair with an older woman are one part of the book. The other part details
happenings in the radio station, focusing in particular on a manic Bolivian
scriptwriter- Pedro Camacho- who churns out soap operas non-stop. Interspersed
are plots for the serials attributed to Camacho, as also Marito’s own more
sober productions – fiction within fiction, all of it interesting and amusing. Vargas
approaches his protagonist-alter ego’s budding creative life with a light and
sympathetic touch, brimming with humour. He is less restrained when describing
his family or for that matter his ladylove. But it is his treatment of Camacho
that tends to take a turn for the surreal, funny and tragic and extreme, and I
cannot wonder if Vargas has not moved from realism to caricature here. But I do
not know the life of artists; maybe this is the gritty realism that I wish to
ignore.
We had a very
interesting discussion. Everybody enjoyed the book. Aparna found the soap opera
plots confusing; she says she turned with relief to the love story, the ‘real’
story that she enjoyed very much. She could identify in many ways with the
whole notion of the extended family that Mario is part of, the comings and
goings between the houses, the easy conviviality. It resonated with her own
experience in Benares, where she studied for a year. She was in the lap of the
extended family, while her parents like Marito’s were in the United States.
Verena sensed a slight obsession with Europe, which made her wonder about
cultural hegemony. Shivalik was reading it for the second time and commented
that ‘Aunt Julia…’ was a departure from Vargas’s previous books, which were
darker, and it was possible that he went overboard. Leena was disappointed in
how little one got to know of the food of the place, in a sense she felt the
book possessed very little of the immediate physical flavour. She however,
agreed that the book gave us a very good sense of how life could be in Lima.
I felt bad for
Camacho, but then it was pointed out (Verena? Leena?), that maybe Pedro Camacho
the scriptwriter and Mario the protagonist represent between them the arc of a
writer’s career. One is at the acme of his profession, poised to fail while the
other is starting out. One is a sociopath, egotistical and passionate to the
point of madness, a prolific ascetic whose neuroses bring about his downfall.
The other is young and vulnerable and full of the joy of life – ambitious,
afraid and in love. The one who appears to have tasted the bitter dregs of life
sells fantasy, while the sheltered and sensitive young man would plumb for
realism. And just as these are both different avatars of the creative persona,
so the trajectories of their lives diverge.
The serials by Camacho
in the book feature a fifty-year old man, distinguished with silvering temples,
a broad forehead and an aquiline nose, a handsome and upright man, in the prime of his life, as the main lead. Maria Vargas
Llosa was forty-two when the book came out. Vargas in his later years bears an
uncanny resemblance to Camacho’s hero. I am sure this is not co-incidental -
just read that description and look at this picture -
 |
| Vargas: Camacho's hero? |
But I keep coming back
to a certain gleeful viciousness in Vargas’s treatment of Camacho- is this a
catharsis for the writer, does he needs to witness the devastation of his
forerunner, an artist he reverences in order to step out of his shadow? And is
it again a co-incidence that the book came out a year after Vargas famously
punched his fellow writer and friend, the first giant of South American
literature - Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Did Camacho start out as Salmon and become
a stand in for Marquez? We can only guess and wait for the memoirs.
 |
| Gabriel Garcia Marquez with black eye after being punched by Mario Vargas Llosa |
Both Vargas and
Marquez have been tight-lipped about their altercation though speculation
abounds that the incident involved Vargas’s second wife, Patty. Vargas had at
some point become enamoured of a Swedish airhostess and moved out of his house.
A distraught Patty went to Marquez, Vargas’s great friend at that time. Marquez
apparently counselled her to leave Vargas and ‘consoled’ her. In any case,
Vargas came back to his wife, she filled him in on Marquez’s reactions and
actions and the next thing we know is that Marquez has gone up to Vargas at a
film event, arms outstretched crying ‘Marito’, and gotten a beautiful black eye
in return. Marquez took care to memorialize the resplendent eye the next morning through some photographs, but there has been nothing more from either writer.
In one case however,
we have got something to review the book by. Vargas’s former wife, the
eponymous Julia to whom the book is dedicated, did write her own version of events
in ‘Lo que Varguitas no dijo’ or
‘What little Vargas did not say.’ Vargas made her seven years younger in the
book, but she objects to his portrayal of her as a designing woman with zero
literary pretensions, and the implicit denial of any contribution she may have
made to his literary career.
 |
| Julia Urquidi |
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