Fernando Ampuero ventures into children’s literature with an instructive book about the life of the little fox Run Run | INTERVIEW

One day he was walking through a zoo and approached a cage without an audience. Behind the fence, a gorilla offered him his enormous back. However, a moment later, the writer remembers that the ape turned its head and looked him in the eye. And he found desperation in his gaze. As if a prisoner asked him, without speaking, why they kept him there. When Fernando Ampuero He told his friends that he was going to write the story of the fox run runThey found it funny. “Make the fox talk!” they told him. But like that silent gorilla in his memory, his fox also watches, assimilates in silence. Like evaluating us.

“Run Run. The sad and excessive life of a captive fox”, is the title of the most recent book by Fernando Ampuero who, for the first time, has addressed the demanding child readership. Genre in which he debuts “with great humility”, since he recognizes himself as new in this square. “It never occurred to me that I would write a children’s story, but if I did, it’s because something broke inside me.”, he confesses.

That break has to do with outrage, of course. With the impulse of a moved writer that one afternoon in late November, when the media reported the police persecution of a fox raised as a dog while the family asked that his life be respected, he wrote the story in one go. “This fox, being a puppy, was the victim of traffickers who sold it as a purebred puppy. When his situation reached the press and television, he was already a famous fugitive“, Explain.

Thousands of Peruvians learned then that the animal had first lost its biological family, and then, after discovering its love of hunting chickens, it also lost its human family. For Ampuero, not only is the drama of the animal and that of the cheated family that lovingly raised it impressive, but also the general commotion in the country. “His story about him made us forget for a few weeks the political chaos we are still experiencing. Even its name is surprising: “Run Run”, became the subject of comments and murmurs. It seemed like a round story to me”, he affirms.

As the title warns, it is a melancholic story, but the images illuminated by the brush of the illustrator Camila Gómez provide humor and even the odd laugh. “She understood me and captured everything in watercolor” says Ampuero.

Beyond giving an account of the story that made Run Run popular, your book has to do with identity, with the defense of the instinct of a fox that lives among dogs and chickens.

It’s true. There is a great symbolic weight that appears when writing a book. But I don’t see it that way: this book has to do with my personal experience, as an inhabitant of my city and the planet. When I was 8 years old, I met a Lima surrounded by the countryside, so nature could grow with a certain exuberance. But that has been changing over time, sometimes for the better, but mostly for the worse. We do not stop destroying nature. And I don’t say it just for an ecological feeling, but of humanity, of helping the weak. There is no animal more ferocious than man. He will always find a way to eliminate the rest of the animals. We see it now with the oil spill, with thousands of fish and birds dying. I wrote the book not out of “goodness”: it was a visceral reaction, a natural indignation.

There is a very funny vignette in the book: the chickens read the newspaper and say “We are finally calm” when Run Run has been captured.

They are deceived! (laughs) They don’t know what’s going to happen to them…

How much do you think those chickens represent us as a society?

I believe that much. We all somehow live on a huge chicken farm, where at some point your time comes. Meanwhile, they make you work with the light always on so that you believe that it is daytime and production must continue. However, she left the symbolic side to the readers. This is a simple story, as a children’s story should be.

A simple story, but with a lot of smuggling of ideas…

That contraband is for those who know how to understand.

In the history of Run Run, the role of the family in his charge is key: not being attended by official institutions, they had to denounce the case in the press…

Serious and supposedly efficient mechanisms can’t cope or don’t have the resources, and simply shrug their shoulders. That is why, for many years, people have turned to the media to find justice. The boy and his mother, the adoptive family of Run Run, realized that they had been victims of a scam when they were sold a fox as if it were a purebred dog. And his decision was to go to the press because the neighbors were going to kill him. They felt a special affection for that animal, which the fox paid them back. This is a drama born of human stupidity.

“Reality is often sobering,” you write. Do you really think we can learn something from this story?

That is a phrase that interests me. My intention is not to offer sermons, but to tell a story that has not been told by so many others. Recreate the consequences of a cruel episode, perpetrated by predators of fauna. There must be a record so that children do not forget this story: they will be the ones who will drive change, with a different sensitivity, to solve the problem of animal abuse.

It is when reality acquires a literary format that we can understand its meaning.

Yes. And it organizes you as a writer, because it makes you think about how to put those pieces together. Reality is much more “creative”, maker of stories than fiction.