I remember exactly the ten blocks between the Llosa house, on Ladislao Cabrera street, and La Salle's school. I was five years old and, without a doubt, I was very nervous. That day, my first day of school, I toured them with my mother, who even accompanied me to the classroom and left me in the hands of Brother Justiniano. This introduced me to who would be my Cochabamba friends since then: Artero, Román, Gumucio, Ballivián. The most beloved of them, Mario Zapata, the photographer's son who had documented all the weddings and first communions in the city, would be stabbed to death, years later, in a picanter in Cala-Cala. As he was the most peaceful boy in the world, I have always thought that his horrible death was for defending the honor of a girl.
Brother Justinian was a fallen angel on earth. He had white hair and sweet, endearing eyes. He would take us by the hand and with him we would sing and dance rounds repeating the alphabet and the conjugations, and so, playing, at six months we knew how to read. The postman deposited four magazines at the house every week, three from Argentina and one from Chile: Leoplán, for grandfather Pedro, Para Ti, read by granny Carmen, Mamaé, my mother and Aunt Lala, and, for me, Billiken and The Peneca. I expected those magazines like manna from heaven and read them from start to finish, including the ads.
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My mom had a guitar teacher and was a heavy reader. He lent me The Arab and The Son of the Arab , but he was forbidden me to read Twenty love poems and a desperate song , by Pablo Neruda, a blue book with yellow letters that he hid in his nightstand and reread at night: between yawns, I I heard her. Of course I read it, secretly, and there were some verses that, I was sure (“My body of the wild peasant undermines you / and makes the son jump from the bottom of the earth”), were a mortal sin.
Learning to read is the most important thing that has happened to me in life and, therefore, I always remember with gratitude Brother Justiniano and the rounds between the folders singing and dancing while we memorized the conjugations. Due to reading, that tiny world of Cochabamba became the universe. Thanks to the signs that I converted into words and ideas, I traveled the planet and could even go back in time and become a musketeer, crusader, explorer, or travel through space to the future in silent ships. My mother says that the first manifestation of what, over the years, would be a literary vocation, was that, when I did not like the endings of the stories and novels that I read, with my clumsy lyrics of the time I changed them. I don't remember it, but I do remember the hours I spent reading every day, after coming back from La Salle and having my glass of cold milk with cinnamon, my favorite food. Grandpa Pedro made fun of me: "For the poet, food is prose." But I did not write verses in Cochabamba yet; that would come later, in Piura.
Now that, due to the coronavirus and the forced isolation to which we Madrilenians are subjected, I read from dawn to dusk, ten hours a day in a state of absolute happiness (tempered by fear of the plague), those Cochabamba days return to my memory with the blurred ghosts of the first readings that the subconscious returns to me: the proud Diana Mayo fell surrendered into the arms of her kidnapper Ahmed ben Hassan in the deserts of Algeria; the swordsman who was born in a cell and, like cats, saw in the dark; the Wandering Jew and his incessant pilgrimage around the world. The children of that time - at least in Cochabamba - we did not read comic strips but books, and, without a doubt, that is why I never contracted the addiction to Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse or Popeye, the muscular sailor. But yes to Tarzan and Jane, with whom I flew, from tree to tree, through the jungles of Africa.
The life that we do not live we can dream it. Reading good books is another way of living, freer, more beautiful
In the cobweb library of the University of San Marcos I read my first masterpiece: the Tirant lo Blanc , in the Martín de Riquer edition of 1948. Even earlier, when I was a cadet of Leoncio Prado, I devoured the series of the Musketeers by Alejandro Dumas , and dreamed of D'Artagnan every night.
Nothing has given me as much pleasure and happiness as good books; nothing has helped me as much as they have overcome difficult times. Without literature, I would have committed suicide in that atrocious period when I knew that my father was alive, when he took me to live with him and made me discover loneliness and fear. William Faulkner changed my life in my teens; I read it with pencil and paper to identify his changes in narrator, the time jumps, the eddies of that prose that mixed characters, times and places and suddenly, in the novel, a reordering of the story appeared even better than the chronological one.
In order to read Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and other collaborators of Les Temps Modernes , I learned French, and English to understand Hemingway, Dos Passos, Orwell and Virginia Woolf, and decipher Joyce's Ulysses (what I got it the third time). In a little cottage in Perros-Guirec, in Brittany, in the summer of 1962 I read the volume of La Pléiade dedicated to Tolstoy and since then War and Peace seems to me to be the pinnacle of novelism, with Don Quixote and Moby Dick . Among those of the 20th century, no one has surpassed, in my opinion, Malraux's The Human Condition , with the exception of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain . In Paris, the first day I arrived, in August 1959, I discovered Flaubert and spent the whole night in the Wetter Hotel, reading Madame Bovary. It was for me the most fruitful of discoveries: thanks to Flaubert I knew the writer who wanted to be and the one who did not want to be.
The coronavirus has resurrected barbarism in what we believed to be civilization and modernity
Good readings not only produce happiness; they teach to speak well, to think boldly, to fantasize, and they create critical citizens, suspicious of the official lies of that supreme art of lying that is politics. The life that we do not live we can dream it, reading the good books is another way of living, freer, more beautiful, more authentic. This alternative life is also fortunate to be out of the reach of the demonic plagues that always terrified human beings because they saw devils, who, unlike flesh and blood enemies, were difficult to defeat.
A good reader is the ideal citizen of a democratic society: he never settles for what he has, he always aspires to more or to things other than what they offer him. Without these nonconformists, true progress would be impossible, which, in addition to enriching material life, increases freedom and the range of choices to adjust one's life to our dreams, desires and illusions. Karl Popper was right: we have never been better than now (in free countries, of course).
The coronavirus has resurrected barbarism in what we believed to be civilization and modernity. We have seen horrible things in Madrid, such as in the residences: old people apparently abandoned by caregivers who had no masks or remedies or any help. The dead living with the living, sleeping in the same beds. Horror always surpasses horror, no matter the historical time. Even so, with all the economic and social ruin that this unexpected plague will bring to the country, if, after surviving it, there are in Spain one million more Spaniards, or at least one hundred thousand, won to good reading thanks to the Forced quarantine, the plague demons will have done a good job.
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© Mario Vargas Llosa, 2020.
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