"Good literature builds bridges between different people and making us enjoy, suffer, or surprise, we are united under the languages, beliefs, customs and prejudices that separate us. When the great white whale buries Captain Ahab at Sea, shrinks the hearts of readers identically in Tokyo, Lima or Timbuktu. When Emma Bovary is swallowed arsenic, Anna Karenina throws herself into the train and up Julien Sorel the scaffold, and when, in "El Sur", the urban doctor Juan Dahlmann out of that grocery store of the pampas to face the knife of a killer, or point out that all the inhabitants of Comala, the town of Pedro Páramo, are dead, the thrill is like the reader who worships Buddha, Confucius, Christ, Allah or is an agnostic view of a jacket and tie, hijab, kimono and pants. Literature creates a brotherhood within the human diversity and eclipses that erect boundaries between men and women of ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages \u200b\u200band stupidity.
Like all ages have had their horrors, ours is the fans, that of suicide bombers, ancient species killing convinced that paradise is gained, which the blood of the innocent wash collective outrage, correct injustices and imposes the truth about false belief. Countless victims are sacrificed each day at various locations around the world who feel possessors of absolute truths. We thought that with the collapse of totalitarian empires, coexistence, peace, pluralism, human rights, would be imposed and the world would back the holocaust, genocide, invasions and wars of extermination. None of that has happened. Proliferate new forms of barbarism fueled by fanaticism and, with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction can not be excluded that any small group of crazed redemptive one day cause a cataclysm nuclear. You have to stand in their way, face them and defeat them. Not many, but the sound of their crimes reverberate around the globe and we are overwhelmed with horror the nightmares they cause. We must not be intimidated by those who would take away the freedom we have been winning in the long feat of civilization. Defend liberal democracy, with all its limitations, continues to mean political pluralism, coexistence, tolerance, human rights, respect for the critics, the law, free elections, the alternation in power, whatever has been drawing from life and getting closer, though feral will never achieve it, the beautiful and perfect life pretends literature, one that just making it up, writing it and reading it we deserve. Facing the homicidal fanatics defend our right to dream and make our dreams come true.
In my youth, like many writers of my generation, was a Marxist and believed that socialism would be the remedy to the exploitation and social injustices that raged in my country, Latin America and the rest of the Third World. My disappointment of statism and collectivism, and my transition to liberal Democrat and I am, I try to be-was long, difficult, and took out episodes slowly and following the conversion of Cuban Revolution, which had me excited at first, the vertical and authoritarian model of the Soviet Union, the testimony of dissidents who managed to slip through the barbed wire of the Gulag, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries, thanks to thinkers as Raymond Aron, Jean-Francois Revel, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, whom I owe my appreciation of the culture of democracy and open societies. These teachers were an example of lucidity and grace when the intelligentsia of the West seemed, frivolity or opportunism, have succumbed to the spell of Soviet socialism, or worse yet, the coven's bloody revolution China's cultural.
As a child I dreamed of someday to Paris because, dazzled with French literature, thought to live there and breathe the air they breathed Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Proust, help me become a real writer, if not out of Peru would only be a pseudo-writer on Sundays and holidays. And the truth is I owe to France, French culture, memorable lessons, as that literature is both a vocation as a discipline, a job and stubbornness. I lived there when Sartre and Camus were alive and writing, in the years of Ionesco, Beckett, Bataille and Cioran, the discovery of Brecht's theater and the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, the NPT Odéon Jean Vilar and Jean Louis Barrault, the Nouvelle Vague and Le Nouveau Roman and speeches, beautiful pieces of literature, Andre Malraux, and perhaps the most theatrical show Europe at that time, press conferences and Olympic thunder General de Gaulle. But perhaps what most grateful to France is the discovery of Latin America. I learned that Peru was part of a vast community that sister history, geography, social and political problems, some way of being and the delicious language speaking and writing. And in those same years produced a new literature and thriving. There I read Borges, Octavio Paz, Cortázar, García Márquez, Fuentes, Cabrera Infante, Rulfo, Onetti, Carpentier, Edwards, Donovan and many others, whose writings were revolutionizing the English-language fiction and thanks to whom Europe and much the world discovered that Latin America was not only the continent of coups, the leaders of operetta, the bearded guerrillas and shakers of the mambo and the cha cha, but also ideas, fantasies and literary art forms that transcended the picturesque and spoke universal language.
From then to this day, not without tripping and slipping, Latin America has been progressing, although, as stated in the verse of César Vallejo, still there, brothers, much to do. Dictatorships have less than before, only Cuba and its candidate to go along, Venezuela, and some pseudo-populist democracies and clowns, as in Bolivia and Nicaragua. But in the rest of the continent, evil evil, democracy is working, supported by broad popular consensus, and for the first time in our history, we have a left and right, as in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia , Dominican Republic, Mexico and most Central American respect the law, freedom of criticism, elections and the renewal in power. That is the good way, and if you persevere in it, fighting the insidious corruption and is integrating the world, Latin America will finally be the continent of the future and will be present.
I've never felt a foreigner in Europe or indeed anywhere. In all the places I lived in Paris, London, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bMadrid, Berlin, Washington, New York, Brazil and the Dominican Republic, I felt at home. I've always found a lair where he could live in peace and working, learn things, to encourage illusions, find friends, good books and topics for writing. I do not think I have become, without intending to, a citizen of the world, has weakened what they call "roots", my links to my own country, so neither would have much importance, because if so, the Peruvian experience would not feed me as a writer and asomarían not always in my stories, even when they seem occur far from Peru. I have to live so long outside the country where I was born rather strengthened those bonds, adding a more lucid, and nostalgia, which can differentiate the adjective and the substance and keeps reverberating memories. Love of country in which you were born can not be obligatory, but, like any other love, a movement spontaneous heart, as the uniting of lovers, parents and children, friends together.
In Peru I take him in the belly because he was born, grew up, I trained and lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality, forged my vocation, and because that I loved, hated, rejoiced, and I had dreamed. What happens in it affects me, moves and irritates me more than what happens elsewhere. I have not sought and will not have set me, it just is. Some fellow accused me of being a traitor and I was about to lose citizenship when, during the last dictatorship, asked the Democratic governments the world to penalize the regime with diplomatic and economic sanctions, as I have always done with all dictatorships, of whatever nature, that of Pinochet, Fidel Castro, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the imams of Iran, apartheid South Africa, the uniformed satraps of Burma (now Myanmar). And do it again tomorrow if-the fate forbid and Peruvians do not permit-Peru was once again victim of a coup to annihilate our fragile democracy. That was no precipitate action and passion of resentment, as they wrote some polygraphs used to judge others from their own smallness. It was an act consistent with my belief that a dictatorship is an absolute evil for a country, a source of brutality and corruption and deep wounds that are slow to close, poison their future and create unhealthy habits and practices that extend along generations delaying the democratic reconstruction. That is why dictatorships must be combated mercilessly by all the means at our disposal, including economic sanctions. It is regrettable that democratic governments, instead of setting an example, in solidarity with those who, as the Ladies in White in Cuba, the Venezuelan-resistant, or Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, boldly facing the dictatorships who suffer, to be displayed often complacent not to them but with his executioners. Those brave, fighting for their freedom, also fighting for ours.
A compatriot of mine, José María Arguedas, Peru called the country of "all the blood." Do not think there formula to define it better. That we are and that all Peruvians have inside, like it or not: a sum of traditions, races, creeds and cultures from the four cardinal points. I feel proud heir of the Hispanic cultures that made fabrics and feather cloaks Nazca and Paracas and Mochica and Inca ceramics on display in the best museums in the world, the builders Machu Picchu, the Great Chimu, Chan Chan, Kuelap, Sipan, the Witch and huacas of the Sun and the Moon, and English, with his saddlebags, swords and horses, brought to Peru to Greece, Rome, Judeo-Christian tradition, the Renaissance, Cervantes, Quevedo and Góngora, language and Castilla brunt of the Andes softened. And that also came with Spain Africa with his vigor, his music and his effervescent imagination to enrich the diversity of Peru. If we dig a little we found that Peru, like Borges' aleph, is in small format worldwide. What an extraordinary privilege for a country that has no identity because it has them all!
The conquest of America was cruel and violent as all the gains, of course, and we criticize it, but without forgetting to do, that those who committed those crimes were offal and in large numbers, our grandfathers and great grandfathers, English who went to America and there acriollado, not those who stayed on their land. Those criticisms, to be fair, should be a self-criticism. Because, after gaining independence from Spain, two hundred years ago, who took power in the former colonies, instead of redeeming the Indian and do justice to the ancient wrongs, so continued exploiting greed and ferocity as the conquerors, and in some countries , diezmándolo y exterminándolo. Digámoslo con toda claridad: desde hace dos siglos la emancipación de los indígenas es una responsabilidad exclusivamente nuestra y la hemos incumplido. Ella sigue siendo una asignatura pendiente en toda América Latina. No hay una sola excepción a este oprobio y vergüenza.
Quiero a España tanto como al Perú y mi deuda con ella es tan grande como el agradecimiento que le tengo. Si no hubiera sido por España jamás hubiera llegado a esta tribuna, ni a ser un escritor conocido, y tal vez, como tantos colegas desafortunados, andaría en el limbo de los escribidores sin suerte, sin editores, ni premios, ni lectores, cuyo talento acaso —triste consuelo— posterity will one day discover. In Spain, all my books published, awards received exaggerated, as Carlos Barral and friends Carmen Balcells and many others crave it because my stories have readers. And Spain gave me a second nationality if he could lose mine. I have never felt the slightest inconsistency between a Peruvian and have a English passport because I have always felt that Spain and Peru are the obverse and reverse of the same thing, not just in my little person, also in critical situations such as history, language and culture.
Of all the years I've lived on English soil, remember I spent five glare dear in Barcelona in the early seventies. The Franco dictatorship was still standing and still shot, but it was already a fossil in rags, and especially in the field of culture, unable to maintain the controls of yesteryear. Opened cracks and crevices that censorship was not enough to patch and English society they absorbed new ideas, books, schools of thought and values \u200b\u200band artistic forms hitherto prohibited by subversives. No city took both Barcelona and better than the beginning of opening or experienced a similar excitement in all fields of ideas and creation. It became the cultural capital of Spain, where he had to be breathing the advance of freedom is coming. And in a way, was also the cultural capital of Latin America by the number of painters, writers, editors and artists from Latin American countries that settled there, or came and went to Barcelona, \u200b\u200bbecause it was where you had to be if you I wanted to be a poet, novelist, painter or composer of our time. For me, those were the years of unforgettable companionship, friendship, conspiracies and fruitful intellectual work. As before Paris, Barcelona was a Tower of Babel, a universal cosmopolitan city, which was exciting to live and work, and where, for the first time since the days of civil war English and Latin American writers were mixed and fraternized, recognized masters of the same tradition and allies in a common and a certainty that the end of the dictatorship was imminent and that in democratic Spain's culture is the main protagonist.
Although it was not so precisely, the English transition from dictatorship to democracy has been one of the best stories of modern times, an example of how, when common sense and rationality prevail and political opponents parked for sectarianism the common good, such prodigious events can occur as of the novels of magical realism. The English transition of authoritarianism to freedom, underdevelopment to prosperity, a society of contrasts and inequalities Third World country to a middle class, its integration into Europe and its adoption in a few years of a democratic culture, admired the world and triggered modernization of Spain. It was for me an exciting and enlightening live up close and sometimes from within. Hopefully nationalism, incurable plague the modern world and also from Spain, do not spoil this happy story.
hate all forms of nationalism, ideology, or, rather, religion, parochial, short flight, exclusive, that cuts the horizon intellectual and hides in its bosom ethnic and racial prejudices, it becomes the supreme value, in moral and ontological privilege, the happenstance of place of birth. Along with religion, nationalism has been the cause of the worst slaughters of history, as the two world wars and the current bloodletting in the Middle East. Nothing has contributed as much as nationalism in Latin America is balkanized, torn apart in senseless strife and litigation and wasted astronomical resources to buy weapons instead of building schools, libraries and hospitals.
not confuse nationalism ear and its rejection of "other" provided seed of violence, with patriotism, feeling healthy and generous love for the land where one was born, where their ancestors lived and forged the first dream, landscape geographies family, loved ones and occurrences that become landmarks of memory and shields against loneliness. The homeland are not flags and anthems, or apodictic discourse on the iconic heroes, but a handful of places and people that live in our memories and tinged with melancholy, the warm feeling that, no matter where we are, there is a home to which we return.
Peru is for me a Arequipa where I was born but never lived, a city that my mother, my grandparents and my uncles taught me to know through his memories and regrets, because my whole family tribe, as they often do Arequipa, was always at the White City with her in his wandering existence. Piura is the desert, carob and suffering burrito, which Piurans of my youth called "foot outside," cute and sad nickname, "where I discovered that the storks were not bringing babies into the world but the pairs produced by a brutality that was a mortal sin. San Miguel is the College and the Variety Theatre where I first saw up on stage a short work written by me. Is the corner of Columbus and Diego Ferré in Miraflores Lima-we called Barrio Alegre, where I changed the long shorts, I smoked my first cigarette, I learned to dance, to love and pleading for the girls. It's dusty and shaky editorial staff of The Chronicle where, in my sixteen years, my first veiled weapons journalist, a profession that, with the literature, has occupied most of my life and made me like books, live, learn better world and hang out with people from everywhere and of all records, great people, good, bad and atrocious. It is the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, where I learned that Peru was the small pocket of middle class where I had lived until then confined and protected, but a country big, old, bitter, mixed and shaken by all sorts of social storms. Are Cahuide clandestine cells in which a handful of San Marcos with preparing the world revolution. And Peru is my friends with the Freedom Movement, for three years, including bombings, blackouts and terrorist killings, work in defense of democracy and culture of freedom.
Peru is Patricia's cousin turned up little nose and indomitable character with which I was fortunate to marry 45 years ago and still supports the foibles, neuroses and tantrums to help me write. Without it my life had long ago dissolved into a chaotic whirlwind had not been born Alvaro, Gonzalo, Morgan and six grandchildren and cheer us prolong life. She does everything and does it well. Solve problems, manage the economy, brings order to chaos, keeping out journalists and outsiders, defending my time, decides the appointments and travel, and unpack it, and is so generous that even when you create scolds me, I make the best of praise: "Mario, the only thing you serve is to write."
Back to the literature. The paradise of childhood is for me a literary myth but a reality that I lived and enjoyed in the large family house of three courtyards, in Cochabamba, where with my cousins \u200b\u200band schoolmates could play Tarzan stories and Salgari, and in the Prefecture of Piura, in whose attics nesting bats, silent shadows which filled with mystery the starry nights that hot country. In those years, writing was playing a game that I held the family, a grace that I deserved applause, to me, grandchild, nephew, the son without father because my father had died and gone to heaven. It was a tall and handsome, uniformed sailor, whose photo adorned my bedside and prayed and kissed me before bed. One morning in Piura, which still does not think I have recovered, my mother told me that this gentleman, indeed, was alive. And that same day we would go to live with him to Lima. I was eleven and since then, everything changed. I discovered I lost my innocence and loneliness, authority, adult life and fear. My salvation was read, read good books, take refuge in those worlds where life was exciting, intense, one adventure after another, where they could feel free and be happy again. And it was written, in secret, as he is delivered to a shameful vice, a forbidden passion. The literature was no longer a game. It became a way to withstand adversity, to protest, to rebel, to escape the intolerable, my reason for living. From then until now, in all the circumstances in which I have been shot or beaten, on the edge of despair, give me body and soul to my work has been the light storyteller that signals the end of the tunnel, the salvation that leads to shipwreck on the beach.
Although I find it hard work and makes me sweat blood, and as a writer, I sometimes feel the threat of paralysis, the drought of the imagination, nothing has made me enjoy the life as much as the months pass me and years building a history, from its uncertain dawn, the stored memory image of a lived experience, which became a restlessness, an enthusiasm, a daydream that germinated later in a project and the decision to try to turn that fog agitated of ghosts in a story. "Writing is a way to live," said Flaubert. Yes, very true, a way of life with enthusiasm and joy and a crackling fire in the head, struggling with wayward words to master it, exploring the wide world as a hunter in pursuit of coveted prey to feed the fledgling fiction and placate the voracious appetite to grow throughout history that would swallow all the stories. Come to feel the vertigo that leads a novel in gestation, when it takes shape and appears to start living on their own, with characters that move, act, think, feel and command respect and consideration, which is no longer possible arbitrarily impose a behavior or deprived of their free will without killing them, without losing history persuasive power, is an experience that is spellbinding as the first time, so full and giddy like making love with the woman he loved days, weeks and months, endlessly .
Speaking of fiction, I talked a lot about the novel and some of the theater, another of his supernal forms. A great injustice, of course. The theater was my first love, since, adolescent, I saw at the Teatro Segura in Lima, The Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller, a show which left me overflowing with excitement and rushed me to write a drama with Inca. If the Lima of the fifties had been a theatrical movement would have been a playwright before than a novelist. I had not and that should be increasingly directed towards the narrative. But my love of theater never ceased, dozed nestled in the shadow of the novels, as a temptation and a nostalgia, especially when I saw a captivating piece. In the late seventies, the persistent memory of a centuries-old aunt, Mom, that in the last years of his life, cut with the surrounding reality and take refuge in the memories and fiction, I suggested a story. And I felt so ominous, that this was a story for the stage, on stage only charged for the animation and splendor of successful fiction. I wrote the trembling excited both beginner and I enjoyed watching the scene with Norma Aleandro in the role of the heroine, who, since then, including novels and novels, essays and essay, I have relapsed several times. Of course, I never imagined that in my seventies, I would go up (maybe I should say drag) on \u200b\u200bstage to act. Reckless adventure that made me live for the first time in flesh and blood the miracle that is, for someone who has spent his life writing fiction, embodying a few hours to a character in the fantasy fiction live before an audience. I can not thank enough my dear friends, the director and actress Joan Ollé Aitana Sanchez Gijon, encouraged me to share this fantastic experience with them (despite the panic that accompanied it).
Literature is a false representation of life, however, helps us to understand better, to guide us through the maze in which we were born, evolves, and we die. She retaliated us the setbacks and frustrations that real life deals us and thanks to decipher it, at least partially, the hieroglyph which is usually the existence for the vast majority of human beings, especially those that encourage more questions than answers, and confess our perplexity about issues like transcendence, the individual and collective destiny, the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of history, the here and more beyond the rational knowledge.
has always fascinated me to imagine that uncertain circumstances in which our ancestors, yet slightly different animal, baby language that allowed them to communicate, began in the caves, around campfires, in boiling nights threat-rays thunder growling of wild beasts, "to make up stories and tell them. That was the turning point of our destination, because in these rounds of primitives suspended by the voice and the imagination of the counter, civilization began, the long passage which gradually humanize us and lead us to invent the sovereign individual and detach them of the tribe, science, arts, law, liberty, scrutinizing the entrails of nature, the human body, space and travel to the stars. Those tales, fables, myths, legends, which first sounded like music to new audiences intimidated by the mysteries and dangers of a world where everything was unfamiliar and dangerous, should have a refreshing swim, a haven for those always on the minds who lives, for which there is meant to just eat, shelter from the elements, kill and fornicate. Since the community began to dream, to share dreams, encouraged by the storytellers, were no longer tied to the wheel of survival, a whirlwind of chores stultifying, and his life became sleep, enjoyment, fantasy and a revolutionary design: to break this containment and change and improve, a fight to quell those desires and ambitions that they incited the lives figurative, and curiosity about the unknown clear that I was studded environment.
That process is never interrupted when he was born rich writing and stories, as well as heard, could read and reached the residence, which confers the literature. Therefore, it must be repeated endlessly to convince it to future generations: the fiction is more than entertainment, rather than an intellectual exercise sharpens awareness and awakens the spirit critical. It is a necessity for civilization still exists, renewing and preserving the best of us human. Not to go back to the barbarism of the isolation and life is not reduced to the pragmatism of the specialists who see things in depth but ignore their surroundings, precedes and continues. For let us not serve us to invent machines to be their servants and slaves. And because a world without literature would be a world without ideals or desires or contempt, a world of automatons without what makes the human being truly human: the ability to leave and move himself into another, in others, modeled with the clay of our dreams.
From the cave to the skyscraper, the stick to weapons of mass destruction, tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have been many human experiences, preventing men and women succumb to lethargy, withdrawal, resignation. Nothing has sown so much concern, removed both the imagination and desires, and that life of lies that we add to the literature through to star the great adventures, great passions, that real life will never give us. The literature lies become truths through us, readers processed contaminated desires and, because of the fiction, question with the mediocre permanent reality. Sorcery, to delude ourselves with having what we have, being what we are not, access that can not exist where, as pagan gods, we are earthly and eternal at the same time, literature enters our minds the nonconformity and rebellion behind all the feats that have helped reduce violence in human relations. To reduce violence, not end it. Because we will always, fortunately, an unfinished story. So we have to keep dreaming, reading and writing, the most effective way we found to alleviate our perishability, to beat the weather and woodworm to make the impossible possible. "
Stockholm, December 10, 2010.
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