- Good evening and welcome
to the first lecture of the 2017 Randy L. and Melvin
R. Berlin Family Lectures, a series co-sponsored by
the International House Global Voices project and the University of Chicago
Division of the Humanities. Our esteemed guest, the
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa will spend the next four Monday evenings discussing his creative process in a series entitled The
Writer and His Demons. But before Mr. Vargas
Llosa comes to the stage, allow me a few moments to
touch on why he is here not just as a guest of
the University of Chicago, but specifically as part of the Berlin Family Lecture Series. First, I want to thank
Randy and Melvin Berlin who are in attendance tonight for their generosity in making
this annual event a reality. The Berlin Family Lectures
were established in 2013 to bring to campus individuals who are making fundamental
contributions to the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences. In addition to offering
a series of lectures, the visitors develops
a book for publication with the University of Chicago Press. With my friends from UChicago
Press sitting in front of me, I should point out that the 2015 lectures delivered by author Amitav Ghosh were just published last
fall by the UChicago Press as The Great Derangement: Climate
Change and the Unthinkable. We look forward to
seeing Mr. Vargas Llosa's lectures in print soon preserving his words
for generations to come. The 2018 lectures I'm
delighted to announce will be delivered by the architect and urban visionary Jeanne Gang who is also in attendance tonight. I invite all of you here to
join us next year in April and each year thereafter
for a lecture series that continually promises
new ideas and fresh insights into the condition of the human. Now, what unites these diverse scholars and makes these lectures so special? I call your attention to
the use of the present tense in the mission statement
of the lecture series. Individuals who are making
fundamental contributions to the arts, humanities and
humanistic social sciences. We invite scholars who
are intellectually active, who continue to create, continue to work and continue to think deeply about fundamental issues of common concern. Humanistic inquiry in all its forms is a process of reevaluation
and reexamination. There is also something
special about a lecture series. By asking each lecturer to
speak in an extended format it asks all of us, both
speaker and audience, to engage with arguments and ideas over a long period of time. I hope to see many of you in
the audience again and again over the next three weeks as we take an intellectual
journey with Mario Vargas Llosa. For someone consumed with writing, Mr. Vargas Llosa has
spent considerable time thinking about reading. In a 1997 essay, Seeds of Dreams, Vargas Llosa writes that every
writer is firstly a reader and to be a writer is also a different way of continuing to read. Reading and writing are acts of life and living for Vargas Llosa. I encourage all of you to read and reread his 2010 Nobel Prize lecture entitled In Praise of Reading and Fiction. This wonderful love letter
to reading and writing also includes a call to
recognize the utility and necessity of literature. It is not enough says Vargas Llosa for literature to entertain
or provide beauty. It can and certainly does
take us into dreamworlds and show us the wonders of life. But literature can also reveal new paths, expose us to different ideas and alert us to oppression
and outmoded ways of thinking. Like writing, Vargas Llosa writes, reading is a protest against
the insufficiencies of life. The debate over the utility of literature is the same one the humanities face. How do the humanities fit
into our world of big data, fast moving information networks and instant gratification? In many ways, this lecture
series was designed to offer partial answers
to this important question for multiple disciplines. What does a legal theorist have to say about corruption and politics? Why is it necessary for
contemporary literature to intervene in debates
over global warming? What is the relationship
between an author and his works? And what does this say about
the process of creating art? Each of these questions has been taken up by past Berlin lecturers and provides an answer for the need for the humanities in our daily life. Although I am up here
to introduce our guest, Mario Vargas Llosa, most of you do not need to be enlightened on his seven decade career
and accomplishments. It is an understatement to say he fits the bill for the
Berlin Family Lectures. As you probably know, he is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature and he is an accomplished
novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright, politician and even professional actor
making his stage debut two years ago at the age of 78 for his play Tales of the Plague. Perhaps he plays an instrument as well, I haven't asked but I do know that he spoke in Stockholm
about his great love for music especially of the 19th century. He likens the craft of writing
to that of composing music. For him, structure including
the working out of motives, how they appear and disappear gives a work whether musical or
literary the possibility of success or failure. And his novels are of
course among the classics of the 20th century. I can't list them all,
there are 19 in total but he will discuss four touchstone works during this series. The Time of the Hero from 1963, Conversation in the Cathedral 1969, The War of the End of the World from 1981 and the Feast of the Goat from 2000. Over the next four Monday evenings Mr. Vargas Llosa will
discuss one of these novels in the context of his demons which he has described as
the inescapable passions arising from a writer's individual, collective and cultural experiences. Like you, I can't wait to hear more from one of the true literary
giants of the 20th century. Please join me in welcoming
Mario Vargas Llosa who tonight will offer
the first of four lectures on The Writer and His Demons. Thank you. (audience clapping) - Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for this
very generous presentation and thank you to the University of Chicago for inviting me to this
prestigious institution, and to the Berlin Family for
sponsoring these lectures. A writer cannot speak about his books as a critic with the objectivity and the impersonal
perspective that a critic has. A writer cannot separate the text of the context of his books. So in these lectures I'll
probably speak much more about the context than the text of
these four novels of mine. The first novel, La ciudad y los perros, which was translated as
The Time of the Hero, I hated the title.
(audience laughing) It was imposed on me by the literary editor of Grove Press which was the publishing house that published the book
for the first time. He didn't like city and dog, so The City and the Dogs as I proposed him and he said that this title
was not catching enough. He wanted a very catching title. And so, he used Time of the
Hero which I always hated. Particularly because if there
is a thesis in the novel is that there are no heroes. That the official heroes are
very artificial creations and that the real heroes are very discreet and not publicly recognized. Well anyway, I wrote this novel because something happened to me. This is something that I can say about all novels, short stories and
plays that I have written. I have written stories because I have had certain experiences that for a mysterious
reason remain in my memory and become little by little obsessions, recurrent obsessions that push me to fantasize around these images, that as I said, I don't know why remaining my memory and
become a very fertile impulsions to fantasize about. Well, the experience that is behind The Time of the Hero was two years that I spend in a military school in Lima in 1950 and 1951. The military school
Leoncio Prado was a very special kind of institution. It was a military school,
not a military academy it was a school, the last three years
of the secondary school which was put under the
control of the military. My father send me to this military school because he thought that
the military would cure me of my literary vocation. (audience laughing) He had discovered that I
wrote poems, short stories and he became extremely worried. He saw that the literary vocation was a passport to failure in life, that writers were Bohemians,
marginal kind of people are not very virile, you know? He said, he thought that a military school would be the best cure for this extravagant kind of vocation
which was literature. And actually, these two
years that I was in the Leoncio Prado Military School gave me the raw material
for my first novel. (audience laughing) And in way I become
contrary to what he thought in the two years that I
was in this military school a professional writer. A kind of professional writer because as one of the characters of the novel, Alberto, the poet is
called by his comrades, I wrote love letters for my comrades and also erotic stories that I changed with my friends by cigarettes. (audience laughing) To be two years in a
military school was for me a great adventure. Since I learned how to read
when I was five years old I had been reading novels of adventures and my infancy, my adolescence was full of these fantastic stories in which the characters had
very extraordinary experiences which in the real life nobody had. And I wanted very bad one
day to experience something of the characters of this
novel of Jules Verne, of Alexandre Dumas that I read with such pleasure in my youth. Well, the Leoncio Prado Military School was my great, great adventure when I was 13 and 14 years old. The Leoncio Prado Military School was a very special institution in Peru. Was probably the only institution
at that time in the '50s that was a kind of very objective representation of what Peruvian society was at that time. At that time Peru was a
very structured society in which each social class was totally ignorant of what was the kind of lie that
other social classes have. If you were a young boy of a middle class living in Lima in the
coastal region of Peru, you had a very distorted
idea of what Peru was. You didn't know that Peru
was a very diverse society with people of different origins and you ignore the enormous inequalities that were the major social
characteristic of the country. You ignore completely all the violence, the contradictions and the
enormous social problems that the country experience. I had probably the idea that Peru was a white country of white
people from European origin. And that in a way we can say a very civilized kind of society. That was the idea that a
middle class boy living in Lima had of the country. I discover entering the
Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado that Peru was a completely
different kind of country, that it was a country of white people, of Indian people, of
halbred people, Cholos that was a country of black people, of Chinese people, of Japanese people. And that there were rich families and there was a very large middle class which was also divided
in an upper middle class, in a middle middle class,
in a very low middle class. And also, very poor, poor
people which was probably there in the military school representing the largest Peruvian society. Why was the Leoncio Prado
the only institution in which this complex and diverse society was well-represented. Because people send their sons to the military school
for different reasons. Rich people of upper class people send them like to a correctional because they were very
dificil to educate, to control and they thought that a military school would put them in the real discipline world. There were many, many young Peruvians who wanted to become after military and so they went to the Leoncio Prado as a military preparation
for being officers in the navy, in the aviation, in the army. And there were many poor Peruvians who entered the military school because the military school
had a hundred grants every year who permit people of
very, very poor origin enter the military school. It was a reproduction
of the Peruvian society with all the prejudices, rancors of every social group, you know? And that gave this boarding school a kind of violence that
a boy from a middle class ignored completely and
discovered only there. And it was a military school, so the military imposed
a system of life in which physical force was the supreme value, machismo, you know? You have to be macho,
you have to be physical, aggressive in order to represent what the military school
wanted to make of the cadets. I wasn't happy there but I
am very grateful to my father to have send me to the Leoncio Prado. Because in these two
years in which I was there I discovered the real Peru, the real country in which I was born. And I discovered that this
country was very, very different of the country in which
I thought I was living when I was before the military
school living in Miraflores. Since I was there as a cadet I thought one day I will write
a book about this experience because this experience is so different. So different of the kind of life that a young boy who lives in Miraflores and who belongs to a
family like mine can have. Well, I must stop to say you
something very important. I discover writing this novel
that I was a realist writer, that my literary vocation push me to write stories or novels which imitate reality, which pretend to present an objective description of what is life. I had problems with my literary vocation. Not the ideas of my father
but I have moral problems. I discovered when I was very young the social problems,
the political problems and I said to myself,
how can you be a writer if you live in a country in which very few people really read, if the great majority of Peruvians are completely out of literature? The poor people because they
are poor and they are ignorant and the rich people because
they are ignorant too, and they don't pay any importance to literature to culture. Well, I dissipate all these doubts when I entered the university and I was impregnated with the ideas of the French
existentialist philosophers. You know that France had had
a great cultural influence in Latin America in the past. Not in our days but when I was young French ideas, French
writers, French thinkers impregnated our cultural life. And I was an avid reader
of writers like Sartre, like Camus, even the
Christian existentialist Paul, wait, I don't remember the name. And particularly, reading Sartre was for me extremely important. Because what he said
particularly in one of his books Situation deux qu'est-ce que c'est literature, What Literature Is. It was so encouraging
for a third world young who wanted to be a writer. What he said was literature
is a way to participate in historical changes. Literature is not gratuitous. Words are acts. Writing poems, novels,
short stories, plays, you can participate in
a very effective way diffusing ideas that would be the origin of social and economic and cultural changes in your society. The ideas of Sartre at
that time were for me extremely encouraging because he convince you that
with a literary vocation you were not giving your... You were not acting in a despective way towards the social and economic and political problems of your society. No, literature, he said,
was a way to participate in a very, very effective way in changes. Because the changes in their
origin are always ideas and there is no better way to contaminate a society with
new ideas like literature. I was deeply convinced
with this Sartre ideas and I think my first novel,
La ciudad y los perros, is deeply impregnated
with this ideas of Sartre. It's a novel that wants to describe through the cadets of the military, Leoncio Prado Military School, a country. A country in which the
violence is so spread particularly by the very
diverse composition. Cultural diversity, social diversity, economic diversity, political diversity. When I wrote the novel I
wanted very much to present this military school as a
reproduction in small format of the diversity of Peruvian society. You have there cadets that are coming from the very upper
class like Alberto the poet, or Arrospide the brigadier
of the first company in the school. You have students who belong
to middle middle classes and lower middle classes
like Arana the slave, like the Jaguar who is also
from a very middle class. And then a lot of young students who come from the fields. Or they are Indians or they are black or they are Chinese and Japanese which at that time were the lower and the poorer social classes in Peru. This has changed a lot since but at that time this
configuration of the society was very clearly marked and it
was reproduced in the school. I mentioned the ideas of Sartre which were very useful for
me when I wrote this novel and I would like to
mention also another writer who was extremely, extremely important for my literary vocation, and also for the way in which
I have written all my novels. It was Flaubert. I discovered Flaubert in 1958, many years after I have had the experience of the military school. I was in Paris and I just
a few days later my arrival I bought Madame Bovary of Flaubert and this book really changed my life. What I discover in this fantastic novel I discovered first that you
could be a realist writer, you could tell a story which was a representation of the real world, the world that we known
through our experiences. And at the same time be deeply fascinated with the aesthetic aspect of literature, the beauty, the harmony, the elegance of writing a book could be perfectly matched with
a realist kind of vocation. That is what Flaubert
did in Madame Bovary. He wrote a history
which is very realistic. There is nothing exceptional, there is nothing that you could
not recognize in real life. And at the same time
everything in Madame Bovary is beautiful particularly the language. He had this idea that the
perfect description in a novel is using the exact words, le mot juste. The exact words and that you know that he had this idea that the perfect phrase was something that had a
musical coordination, harmony and that the only way to prove if you had achieved
this in your phrases was shouting what you had written. And when I read Madame
Bovary and I discovered that you could be a realist writer and at the same time be
extremely preoccupied for the aesthetic effect of literature, the importance of language in literature. I discovered the kind of
writer that I wanted to be. The Time of the Hero is a novel which is realist but in which language is extremely, extremely taken care of. I wrote the language in a, let's say, very fastidious, fastidious way trying to applique the
lessons of Flaubert. Searching for the mot juste
for the exact expression without fioritures, without
anything that could. (phone ringing) Sorry.
(audience laughing) I'm so sorry. It happens to me all the time. (audience laughing) I think also I learn a
technique, a way of writing, writing this, my first novel which is something that I have repeated in all the novels that I have written. I did three versions of the story. The first one very
chaotic, a kind of magma in which I try to develop the story, the facts, the characters
repeating episodes, and writing without much
preoccupation for the structure, the organization of the time nor for the language. It was a way.
(phone rings) Oh my god.
(audience laughing) It was a way to fight successfully the kind of depression
that I always experience in the first versions of
the stories that I write. The first version is a
fight against demoralization because I find this conviction
that the story will never, will take off. That the story would remain as a wooden language, without life. I try to have at least in a
very primitive way the story and this is the first version which is for me the
most difficult to write, and as I said a fight
against demoralization. Then I always do a second version in which I start to really
enjoy and write there. The second version for me is to find the structure of the story, the way in which time is organized. And I don't want to
talk now about Faulkner because I shall do it in the next lecture. But probably as important as Flaubert was for me to discover
Faulkner, Faulkner novels when I was at the university. Faulkner was the first writer that I read with a piece of paper and a pen trying to decifrate the structures that he was able to organize,
to inoculate in his stories expectation, mystery, curiosity, a way to hook the attention of the reader. Well, the structure,
the organization of time particularly in the novel is
what is my main preoccupation in this second version of the novel. At that time I was deeply disappointed with the kind of literature that was, the realist literature in Latin America. Because these writers
would seem to believe that if they had very
dramatic and powerful stories they didn't have to worry
about the formal aspects of the book, of the story. No preoccupation with the language and no preoccupation with
the organization of the time which is never in a novel a
reproduction of the real time. When you are a writer you have, when you write a novel you
have to invent two things which are extremely important. Who is going to narrate
the story, the narrator. You can have one narrator, you can have many kind of narrators. Different narrators but you
have to be a clear conscience that you are using a narrator which is always an invented character even if it is invisible. And another very important essential thing you have to invent the
organization of time. The time in a novel is
never the real time, the chronological time
in which we are immersed is something that is an artifice, is something very artificial. We don't know that it's
artificial when this really effective and functional and make you believe the story. But the time is always an
invention, a literary invention. And usually, in this third version for me what is important is the elaboration of a chronological system which made the story more persuasive and can seduce and keep the
attention of the reader. What story tells Time of the Hero? Well, the central argument is very simple. A group of cadets of the 50 year, the last year of the school
steal an exam of chemistry and one of the robbers
of this exam is caught. He's denounced by another cadet and he's expelled in a
very humiliating ceremony. And then a few weeks after
the cadet that denounced the robber is killed
in a military maneuvers at the end of the week. Was this a pure coincidence? Was this a vengeance because this group of robbers discovers the cadet that had accused the, well that is the mystery
let's say that keeps more or less moving the story. But what is really important
in the novel I think is not this anecdote. This kind of three layer but the description of the
life that the cadets invent a kind of secret life which is ignore not only by the families of the cadets but also by the military, by the officers who organize and control
life in the institution. This was for me the most interesting aspect of the, of being a
cadet in the military school. The cadets we had a secret life in which we reproduce distortion in a lot the military life that the
officers wanted to impose on us. And in which all these values,
the military values let's say particularly machismo, discipline, order was a kind of instrument
that the cadets use to express everything that
they brought to the school, the social prejudice,
the racial prejudice. All this violence that
was the violence that the Peruvian society produced in the different families
and all this was part of the secret life that the cadets had in the military school. And what gave to the cadets the enormous violence in which they live. When I speak about violence I am explaining my
experience of the school, afterwards many years
after I was in the school I have had conversations with
comrades of the school. And they had a very different idea. They said what violence? That was absolutely normal,
normal kind of life. Well but it was not for me. It was a normal kind of life for many, many Peruvian families but not for the very
privileged minority of people in which I was part of it. For me it was terrible what happened there but for many, many cadets
it was a normal life. It was a kind of life that
they had in their houses and in their families. One of the criticism that
were done to my novel when it was published, it was that they were not
let's say positive characters, that all characters
were negative, you know? And I strongly rejected this criticism. I think the novel was good, received many, many just
criticism but not that one. Because I think there is
a real hero in the novel which is Lieutenant Gamboa. Lieutenant Gamboa is a
military which is there because he had a military vocation and he's a military that
believe in reclamens, in the, all the dispositions that the army, that the
military have created to produce this kind of
discipline, you know, courageous and let's say very patriotic kind of institution. And he tries very much in the novel for these ideas to be
impressed in the real world. But it's totally impossible and it's totally impossible because the military also have a kind of rhetoric kind of life and the real life which in many, many cases rejects and distortion this
rhetorical life in which Gamboa and only himself
try to reproduce in life. He at the end because he try to be just, because he try to be decent and to act in following
the reclamens is punished and also rejected of the
world of the military and sent to a very isolated
and very primitive garrison. The novel had a very interesting story. I wrote it as I said in Spain
and France far from Peru and this has been always the
case of all my other novels. I need to be away of the place in which my novel is settled. I feel more free to
invent, to change things that if I am in the same place in which my novel is settled, this has been always, although
I do a lot of research because I am a realist
writer and I want to describe the real cities,
the real characters in a way that is more or less similar to what is the real world. To fantasize the story
I need to be far away. I need to be distant of
because that gives me more freedom to distort
things, to change things in order to be more
persuasive for the reader. All of my novels have been written far away from the place
where the story is settled. I always thought that
choosing a literary vocation I would be condemned to be, to have a kind of marginal life because that was the case
of all Peruvian writers that I had met in my youth, you know? Writing was a kind of marginal activity in the Peru of the '50s. It's not the case now, things have changed a lot
for the better fortunately but at that time to be a
writer was to be really a march of the main life, the main current of life in the country. I thought I would organize my life doing journalism, teaching but
literature would be important but literature is not nutritive
for a Peruvian writer. I never could consecrate
my life only for writing. But something happened when
the novel was published. It won a literary prize in Spain (speaks in foreign language) and so the book had a certain publicity. But to my great surprise I discovered one day that
the military in Peru had read the book and that they
were furious with the novel. They considered that the
novel was an act of treason to the country and they have burned in the military school Leoncio Prado many, many exemplaries of the novel, and this of course was a
great publicity for the book. (audience laughing) So much publicity that
until now I am wondering if the success of the novel
was because of the novel or it was because of
the military, you know, that burned the book but
they don't prohibit it. Probably they didn't know that you could prohibit
the book, you know? (audience laughing) And so, the novel become very, well it was a kind of best seller in Peru and to my great, great surprise I discovered that the book would be translated to other languages and that I was interviewed by journalists, and I couldn't believe this
kind of extraordinary adventure that the adventure of the Leoncio Prado was producing in my life. I want to tell you a
very interesting anecdote that happened with the novel. You would believe that a
writer has the last word about what he has written. This is not true. This is not true. I don't think a writer
has the necessary distance with what he has written to know exactly the value of his books. And I don't think this is only my case. I think it's the case
of many, many writers who don't really know what they have done. They may believe if they
are vanidosos, you know, that they have succeed
writing a master work or that they can feel that they, the novel was a defeat, a moral defeat, a literary defeat because it didn't reach what he wanted to achieve with this book. But they never had the
necessary perspective, the necessary objectivity to
evaluate in a just proportion the quality or the lack
of quality of his books. Well, as I told you, there is a question in the novel which the novel doesn't answer because it wants the reader to discover and to decide for himself. Is the Jaguar the killer of the slave because he knew that the slave denounced the serrano Cava and it was the Jaguar that
killed in the maneuvers to the slave? Or as the military want to
believe it was an accident, a very sad accident that, which was responsible the same cadet who was killed because of this. As I told you, to my surprise the novel was translated
to different languages after the biggest scandal that the military produced in Peru. And of course I was
very happy that my novel was translated into French. At that time I was still
a Frenchicized writer. I had resigned myself to
not being a French writer. I discover in Paris that
I was a Latin American. Alas, you know? But I was very proud to discover
that I was Latin American because at that time many
Latin American writers went to Paris, I met them, I discovered that in Latin America there was a very rich and
very creative literature. Although it was not very realist, it was more the magic realism,
the fantastic literature but with very great writers. Garcia Marquez, Borges,
Cortazar, Rulfo, well. But still my love for French
literature was enormous and I was so happy that my book would be translated into French. I went to visit the
director of a Gallimard Collection of Latin American Literature which was a very well-known
French critic, Roger Caillois. He was at that time working in the UNESCO so I asked for an interview and he received me very kind
in his office in UNESCO. And I said, well I am deeply grateful because for me it's a great
honor to be translated and the book to appear in Gallimard which is so prestigious publishing house. And he was also very kind and he told me, "Well, I read your book. "It's a very interesting book." And he said to me, "You know
what I have liked very much in La ciudad y los perros
that the Jaguar at the end without having committed the crime accuses himself of being the criminal only to recover the
popularity that he had lost among his comrades." And I told him, well but that's. (audience laughing) But the Jaguar is the killer of the slave. (audience laughing) And he told me, "What? (audience laughing) "You haven't understood the
novel that you have written." (audience laughing)
And this is quite normal. He told me, "This is
quite normal, you know? Writers don't know what they have done. Of course, this is completely
stupid what you are selling. That would be a very stupid kind of thing if he kills the by vengeance. No, what is very subtle, subtle is this very secret kind of sacrifice that he commits inventing
that he's a criminal only to recover the
leadership that he had lost. You understand?" And I say, "Of course, I understand." (audience laughing) And since then when I have
asked but who killed the? I said, "Maybe he didn't
kill him, you know? "Maybe he invented these." (audience laughing) Well, writers don't have
the last word about that, what they write. Because of this lecture I have reread something of the English translation. I think it's a good translation but that there is something that is lost in the translation unfortunately. Difference among social classes in many countries like in Peru is something that is
represented in the way he speak, the different classes. And I remember very much that
that was one of the things that impress me more when I enter the military school Leoncio Prado. How the way in way in
which I spoke the Spanish was so different from the way in which let's say a middle class Peruvian Cholo would speak the Spanish. He would use words that
I would never use myself and this was not only
the different vocabulary, it was also the music. How the music changes in the different social classes. And I was not thinking
only in characters of different regions, no. Within Lima itself, the way
in which Spanish was spoken but a young boy of a middle class, young boy of the marginals of the city was very, very different. You lost a lot and I am sure they also lost a lot listen me. And I try to reproduce
very carefully in the novel these different ways in which the students and even the
military speak the Spanish. This I think is lost in probably not only in the English translation but in other translations of the novel. I would like to add
something before I finish about the idea of the time. I discovered writing this novel
the importance of the time. The fictitious time, the artificial time that there is in all the novels. Time is in real life something that is exactly the same for everybody but in a novel you cannot
reproduce this kind of time. You have to manipulate the time in order to produce
expectation, curiosity, to hook the attention of the reader. And so I discovered that
you had to invent time exactly as you invent a
narrator to tell a story. And this discovery was particularly in the last episode of the novel. The last episode of the novel Jaguar who after being a kind of devil in the school has finished as a bank employee, discover one day in the
streets many, many years after the story of the novel,
the main story of the novel, his friend of youth Skinny Higueras who was a robber, a criminal. And they were very good
friends when he was young. And I wanted in a way to have a contrast with another encounter
that the Jaguar has done at the end of the novel with the girl to whom he was in love
when he was very young. And experimenting with
different ways in which these two encounters would be united, I suddenly discovered that
if I did just one narration of these two encounters organizing the different, these encounters in different places and different times in a way in which it wouldn't be confusion because the silences in
each of the encounters will be fill by the dialog
in the other encounters. In such a way that since the beginning the reader could be interested in spite of the fact that
this kind of construction was not a realist one but
was very, very artificial. I could tell an episode
in a very different way and impregnate this episode with mystery. Well, I want to mention this because this is a discovery that
helped me very, very much in the other novels that I have written as you will see in the next lectures. Well, I thank you very
much for your attention and it will be until next Monday.
(audience applauding)
