Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

I decided to do what Tasurinchi, the herb doctor, advised. And the next morning, as the eye of the sun began to gaze down at this world from Inkite, I was already walking. I am thinking now of that Machiguenga woman who went so as not to be my wife. I am talking now to all of you. Tomorrow will be as it will be.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

For six months in 1981, I was responsible for a program on Peruvian television called the Tower of Babel. The owner of the channel, Genaro Delgado, had lured me into this venture by flashing before my eyes three shiny glass beads: the need to raise the standard of the channel’s programs, which had fallen to an absolute low of stupidity and vulgarity during the preceding twelve years of state ownership imposed by the military dictatorship; the excitement of experimenting with a means of communication which, in a country such as Peru, was the only one able to reach, simultaneously, a number of very different audiences; and a good salary.

It really was an extraordinary experience, though also the most tiring and most exasperating one that has ever come my way. “If you organize your time well and devote just half your day to the program, that’ll be enough,” Genaro had predicted. “And you’ll be able to go on with your writing in the afternoon.” But in this case, as in so many others, theory was one thing and practice another. The truth was that I devoted every single morning, afternoon, and evening of those months to the Tower of Babel, and most important, the many hours when I didn’t seem to be actually working but was nonetheless busy worrying about what had gone wrong on the previous program and trying to anticipate what would go worse still on the next one.

There were four of us who got out the Tower of Babel programs: Luis Llosa, the producer and director of photography; Moshé dan Furgang, the editor; Alejandro Pérez, the cameraman; and myself. I had brought Lucho and Moshé to the channel. They both had film experience — they had each made shorts — but neither they nor I had worked in television before. The title of the program was indicative of its intent: to show something of everything, to create a kaleidoscope of subjects. We naïvely hoped to prove that a cultural program need not be soporific, esoteric, or pedantic, but could be entertaining and not over any viewer’s head, since “culture” was not synonymous with science, literature, or any other specialized field, but a way of looking at things, an approach capable of tackling anything of human interest. The idea was that during our hour-long program each week — which often stretched to an hour and a half — we would touch on two or three themes as different as possible, so that the audience would see that a cultural program had as much to offer as, let us say, soccer or boxing, or salsa and humor, and that political reporting or a documentary on the Indian tribes of Amazonia could be entertaining as well as instructive.

When Lucho and Moshé and I drew up lists of subjects, people, and locales that the Tower of Babel could use and planned the most lively way of presenting them, everything went like a charm. We were full of ideas and eager to discover the creative possibilities of the most popular medium of communication of our time.

What we discovered in practice, however, was our dependence on material factors in an underdeveloped country, the subtle way in which they subvert the best intentions and thwart the most diligent efforts. I can say, without exaggeration, that most of the time that Lucho, Moshé, and I put in on the Tower of Babel was spent not on creative work, on trying to improve the program intellectually and artistically, but was wasted in an attempt to solve problems that at first sight seemed trivial and unworthy of our notice. What to do, for instance, to get the channel’s vans to pick us up at the agreed time so as not to miss appointments, planes, interviews? The answer was for us to go personally to the drivers’ homes and wake them up, go with them to the channel’s offices to collect the recording equipment and from there to the airport or wherever. But as a solution it cost us hours of sleep and didn’t always work. It could turn out that, on top of everything else, the blessed van’s battery had gone dead, or higher-ups had neglected to authorize the replacement of an oil pan, an exhaust pipe, a tire ripped to shreds the day before on the murderous potholes along the Avenida Arequipa.

From the very first program, I noticed that the images on the screen were marred by strange smudges. What were those dirty half-moons anyway? Alejandro Pérez explained that they were due to defective camera filters. They were worn out and needed replacing. Okay then, replace them. But how to go about getting this done? We tried everything short of murder, and nothing worked. We sent memos to Maintenance, we begged, we got on the phone, we argued face-to-face with engineers, technicians, department heads, and I believe we even took the problem to the owner-director of the channel. They all agreed with us, they were all indignant, they all issued strict orders that the filters be replaced. They may well have been. But the grayish half-moons disfigured all our programs, from first to last. Sometimes, when I tune in on a television program, I can still see those intrusive shadows and think — with a touch of melancholy: Ah, Alejandro’s camera.

I don’t know who it was who decided that Alejandro Pérez would work with us. It turned out to be a good idea, for when allowances have been made for the “underdevelopment handicap”—which he accepted philosophically, never turning a hair — Alejandro is a very skillful cameraman. His talent is purely intuitive, an innate sense of composition, movement, angle, distance. Alejandro became a cameraman by accident. He’d started out as a house painter, come to Lima from Huánuco, and someone had given him the idea that he might earn himself a little extra money by helping to load the cameras in the stadium on days when a soccer match was being televised. From having to load them so often he learned how to handle them. One day he stood in for an absent cameraman, then another day for another, and almost before he knew it, he turned out to be the channel’s star cameraman.

At first his habitual silence made me nervous. Lucho was the only one who managed to talk to him. Or, at any rate, they understood each other subliminally, for in all those six months I can’t remember ever hearing Alejandro utter a complete sentence, with subject, verb, and predicate. Only short grunts of approval or dismay, and an exclamation that I feared like the plague, because it meant that, once again, we had been defeated by all-powerful, omnipresent imponderables: “It’s fucked up again!” How many times did the sound equipment, the film, the reflector, the monitor “fuck up”? Everything could “fuck up” innumerable times: every one of the things we worked with possessed that fundamental property, perhaps the only one toward which all of them, always, gave proof of a dog-like loyalty. How often did minutely planned projects, interviews obtained after exhausting negotiations, go all to hell because close-mouthed Alejandro came out with his fateful grunt: “It’s fucked up again!”

I remember especially well what happened to us in Puerto Maldonado, a town in Amazonia where we had gone to make a documentary short on the death of the poet and guerrilla fighter Javier Heraud. Alaín Elías, Heraud’s comrade and the leader of the guerrilla detachment that had been scattered or captured the day Heraud was killed, had agreed to recount, in front of the camera, everything that had happened on that occasion. His testimony was interesting and moving — Alaín had been in the canoe with Javier Heraud when the latter had been shot to death, and he himself had been wounded in the shoot-out. We had decided to round the documentary out with views of the locale where the incident had taken place and, if possible, with accounts from the inhabitants of Puerto Maldonado who could recall the events of twenty years before.