The decision of Mario Vargas Llosa to leave the home he shared with Isabella Preysler for eight years on the outskirts of Madrid to return to his home on Calle Flora in the capital of Spain, he has found in a story, The windspublished two years ago in the Letras Libres magazine, a breeding ground for relating once again the literature he makes with the life of the Peruvian writer.
That story was published before a certain public or literary indifference, because, like the same character that the author of The puppies in the aforementioned story, less and less is read and, in addition, each time it is written worse. In any case, the story and life seemed to go in parallel, which is why they now collect newspapers, magazines, television programs, dedicated to the comings and goings of hearts.
According to these interpretations, what the protagonist of the story tells, a lost man whose advanced age forces him to bear his own farts and makes him forget the way home, is a metaphor for the drama that Vargas Llosa himself was experiencing.
The story, The winds, would, then, be the chronicle of an announced event: the rupture of that relationship. Therefore, it can be deduced that during these two years that have passed since the magazine founded by the Mexican Enrique Krauze and directed in Spain by Daniel Gascón, the author of The city and the Dogs he would be chained outside of himself living a tragedy whose news took time to be released until Isabel Preysler announced that the writer was leaving the house, among other things because he felt “jealousy”.
The speculations that followed the official note from the now ex-partner of Vargas Llosa were undoubtedly fed with the materials that the author himself left written in the now famous story.
Numerous journalists or assimilated ones added, in addition, anonymous testimonies (attributed, in one case or another) to environments or relatives, so that now Madrid, and not only this city, is infected with connoisseurs of each one of the aspects of that relationship that has been broken, just as it began, under the protection of Hola magazine.
It is unlikely that this series of interpretations, which have had on the existence of The winds the root of a credibility that has not been endorsed by the main male protagonist of the rupture, be rigorously elucidated at least until Vargas Llosa makes a statement, since Isabel Preysler has already released her version of events from the cover of the weekly.
The fight with García Márquez
Many years ago, In 1976, Vargas Llosa starred in an event that separated him forever from one of the great friends of his life, Gabriel García Márquez.. The incident that produced this break has been the subject of much speculation, which has now circulated again. Fed by both silences, Gabo’s and Mario’s, that blow that the latter gave the author of one hundred years of solitudehas been reported as having been seen by a thousand eyes.
Neither Vargas Llosa nor Gabriel García Márquez wanted to explain what had happened. Their respective wives, Patricia and Mercedes, didn’t say anything either, but over the years there were few in the usually vociferous world of literature, journalism and their fringes who didn’t have material to give their version.
Right now that episode whose root both writers kept secret has come up again, and again it is associated with private interests or situations that have never been corroborated. It is impossible to elucidate now, by the way, what happened in Isabel Preysler’s house and why she left, wanted to leave, or was sent to Mario Vargas Llosa.
Preysler’s version is that of the “jealousy”. Vargas Llosa’s is being taken from his own story, but he hasn’t said anything. As in the Gabo/Mario break, this other break is open to the most diverse versions.
While those mysteries with which the press (and not only the press) express their interest in the real matter of the breakup, a custom that has lasted for many years and that also has the Peruvian writer as its protagonist returns to the Spanish national arena.
While this relationship between those who have now broken has lasted, many citizens, from the pen and from political or cultural critics, have speculated on the influence that the social, and even political, commitments of the author of A Fish in the Waterto the influence of his relationship with Isabel Preysler.
And surely this factor has been relevant, without a doubt in his private life, but from this to induce that even his political inclinations, which the right likes and the left scares away, there is a distance that would have to be followed to go from the freedom of a person to the interference of others in the privacy of their ideas and their decisions.
Like or dislike his texts, on the other hand, they are those of Mario Vargas Llosa, they have his style and correspond to a long literary history that, throughout many years, and not only in these seven years of the aforementioned relationship, They have been attacked by those who believe that freedom is only one direction in which those who think as one or the other would like are right or wrong.
A human interpretation
In the days when this sentimental escorro occurred, there have been speculations, numerous press releases and, also, many references to the meaning of The winds. Perhaps the comment that most substantially reflects what could be a human interpretation of this situation that lives between Kafka and, by the way, some texts by Vargas Llosa himself, is the one that The very thoughtful citizen and excellent writer, Sergio del Molino, has just published on Facebook.
That article is about that story, The winds, precisely, and what they deduce in it from the author’s own private life. In the story, Sergio del Molino points out, “there is much more tragedy than comedy, and more human truth than in all the jokes, mockery and hatred about old and powerful men à la mode. It’s easy to laugh at a smug writer, that’s what any Podemos bot with four memes on hand on his mobile does.
“The difficult and beautiful thing – he continues – is to feel sorry for the lost man, who has everything and is everything and loses everything due to a youthful obfuscation, due to his own banality of evil, and realizes too late that he is a wretch , who has deceived himself without being able to excuse himself as a young man would excuse himself: he cannot plead inexperience”.
Del Molino continues, about the story in which the protagonist regrets having left “Carmencita” his wife for another he doesn’t even remember anymore, that this old man who can’t stand his farts and regrets that his dick (his penis, it says so in Peru) it is no longer useful except to pee “he has fallen into the trap like a raging teenager in the midst of hormonal confusion”.
Such a character “awakens sympathy and compassion in anyone who understands something about life and knows well how easy it is to stumble and fall into the graves that we ourselves dig with enthusiasm.”
It is not easy today in journalism, of any genre, to find an interpretation of this kind, because, as Sergio del Molino himself told me when I commented on his brief comment, it is very common now to notice the “very unpleasant moral arrogance” that leads many people to make fun of “the very human weaknesses of a man”.
Perhaps Mario Vargas Llosa will ever tell what he has experienced and do it, again, resorting to fiction that has now given journalism so much to talk about. In the meantime, it is known of him that he has traveled outside Madridaway from the scene of that story and its circumstances.
His son Álvaro uploaded to Twitter some images of his father reading aloud the first edition of Madame Bovarythe work of Flaubert that has influenced his literature so much.
MFB