Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

Even Moshé—who ordinarily stayed behind in Lima to keep up with the editing of the programs — went off to the jungle with Lucho, Alejandro Pérez, and me. In Puerto Maldonado several witnesses agreed to be interviewed. Our great find was a member of the police force who had participated, first off, in the initial incident in the center of town that had revealed the presence of the guerrilleros in Puerto Maldonado to the authorities — an encounter in which a civil guard had been killed — and then later, in the manhunt for Javier Heraud and the shoot-out. The man had since retired from the police force and was working on a farm. Persuading the ex-policeman to allow himself to be interviewed had been extremely difficult, since he was filled with apprehension and reluctant to talk. We finally convinced him and even managed to get permission to interview him in the police station from which the patrols had set out on that day long ago.

At the very moment we started interviewing the ex-policeman, Alejandro’s reflectors began to burst like carnival balloons. And when they had all exploded — so that there would be no doubt that the household gods of Amazonia were against the Tower of Babel — the battery of our portable generator quit and the recording equipment went dead. Fucked up again. And one of the first fruits of the program as well. We returned to Lima empty-handed.

Am I exaggerating things so that they stand out more clearly? Perhaps. But I don’t think I’m stretching things much. I could tell dozens of stories like this one. And many others to illustrate what is perhaps the very symbol of underdevelopment: the divorce between theory and practice, decisions and facts. During those six months we suffered from this irreducible distance at every stage of our work. There were schedules that gave each of the various producers their fair share of time in the cutting rooms and the sound studios. But in point of fact it was not the schedules but the cunning and the clever maneuvering of each producer or technician that determined who would have more or less time for editing and recording, and who could count on the best equipment.

Of course we very soon caught on to the stratagems, ruses, wiles, or charm that had to be used, not to obtain special privileges, but merely to do a more or less decent job of what we were being paid to do. We were not above such tricks ourselves, but all of them had the disadvantage of taking up precious time that we ought to have devoted to purely creative work. Since I’ve been through this experience, my admiration is boundless whenever I happen to see a program on television that is well edited and recorded, lively and original. For I know that behind it there is much more than talent and determination: there is witchcraft, miracle. Some weeks, after viewing the program on the monitor one last time, looking for the perfect finishing touch, we would say to each other: “Good, it came out exactly right in the end.” But despite that, on the television screen that Sunday, the sound would fade away altogether, the image leap out of focus, and completely blank frames appear…What had “fucked up” this time? The technician on duty was drunk or asleep, he’d pressed the wrong button or run the film backward…Television is a risky business for perfectionists; it is responsible for countless cases of insomnia, tachycardia, ulcers, heart attacks…

In spite of all this, and by and large, those six months were exciting and intense. I remember how moved I was interviewing Borges in his apartment in downtown Buenos Aires, where his mother’s room was kept exactly the way she left it the day she died (an old lady’s purple dress laid out on the bed); he apparently never forgave me for having said that his home was a modest one, with a leaky roof. I remember being moved, too, by the portraits of writers painted by Ernesto Sábato, which he allowed us to film in his little house in Santos Lugares, where we went to visit him. Ever since I’d lived in Spain in the early seventies, I had wanted to interview Corín Tellado, whose sentimental Románces, radio soap operas, photo-novels, and television melodramas are devoured by countless thousands in Spain and Hispano-America. She agreed to appear on the Tower of Babel and I spent an afternoon with her, on the outskirts of Gijón, in Asturias — she showed me the basement of the house she was occupying, with thousands of novelettes stowed away on bookshelves: she finishes one every two days, each exactly a hundred pages long. She was living there in seclusion because at the time she had been the victim of attempted extortion, though whether a political group or common criminals were behind it was not clear.

From the houses of writers we took our cameras to the stadiums — we did a program on one of the best Brazilian soccer clubs, the Flamengo, and interviewed Zico, the star of the moment, in Rio de Janeiro. We went to Panama, where we visited amateur and professional boxing rings, trying to discover how and why this small Central American country had been the cradle of so many Latin American and world champions in nearly every weight class. In Brazil, we managed to get our cameras into the exclusive clinic of trim, athletic Dr. Pitanguí, whose scalpels made all the women in the world who could pay for his services young and beautiful; and in Santiago de Chili we spoke with Pinochet’s Chicago Boys and with his Christian Democratic opponents, who, in the midst of extreme repression, were resisting dictatorship.

We went to Nicaragua on the second anniversary of the revolution, to report on the Sandinistas and their adversaries; and to the University of California at Berkeley, where the great poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, worked in a tiny office in the Department of Slavonic Languages. We went to Coclecito, Panama, where we visited General Omar Torrijos at his home there; though theoretically no longer active in government, he was still the lord and master of the country. We spent the entire day with him, and although he was most affable with me, I was not left as agreeably impressed by him as were other writers who had been his guests. He struck me as the typical Latin American caudillo of unhappy memory, the providential “strongman,” authoritative and macho, adulated by civil and military courtiers, who filed through the place all day, flattering him with sickening servility. The most exciting person in the general’s Coclecito house was one of his mistresses, a curvaceous blonde we came upon reclining in a hammock. She was just another piece of furniture, for the general neither spoke to her nor introduced her to the guests who came and went…

Two days after our return to Lima from Panama, Lucho Llosa, Alejandro Pérez, and I felt a cold shiver run down our spines. Torrijos had just died in a fatal crash of the little plane in which he had sent us back to Panama City from Coclecito. The pilot was the same one we had flown with.

I fainted in Puerto Rico, just a day after recording a short program on the marvelous restoration of old San Juan, guided by Ricardo Alegría, who had been the moving spirit of the project. I was suffering from dehydration as a result of stomach poisoning, contracted in the chicha bars of a north Peruvian village, Catacaos, where we had gone to do a program on straw-hat weaving, a craft the inhabitants have been practicing for centuries; on the secrets of the tondero, a regional dance; and on its picanterías, where fine chicha and highly spiced stews are served (these latter responsible, naturally, for my case of poisoning). Words cannot express my thanks to all the Puerto Rican friends who virtually terrorized the kind doctors of San Jorge Hospital into curing me in time for the Tower of Babel to appear on the air at the usual hour that Sunday.