“Now I see a lot more people wanting to get out”

“Life is more like a storybook than a novel,” the writer confides to us on the other end of the line, from his studio in Barcelona. Indeed, we are talking about stories that escape a structure, often based on erratic occurrences. Roncagliolo gives an account of his own experiences and those of his friends and ex-girlfriends, whom he includes as a tribute.

─Without a residence card, “the dreams of the migrant have an expiration date”, you write in one of your stories. How does the lack of papers configure the identity of the migrant?

When you leave, be it to look for a job, be an artist or live free from the restrictions of the society you come from, there is a risk: you migrate because you believe that all your failures are the fault of your country. That exposes you to fail in another country and have no one to blame. In my stories I talk about my first years in Spain, and that panic of returning without having had anything, also feeling like I wasted time. That’s a lot of pressure. I remember that when I first arrived in Spain, many of my friends who had studied in good schools and universities told me: “It’s good that you left, Peru is a disaster.” However, I could not make ends meet and they were assistant bank managers or vice ministers, with a much better life and salary. And every day you wonder how much longer you can take, when you will have to admit that everything went wrong and pick up where you left off. That is a yoke on your head, constant.

─We belong to a generation marked by exile. How much damage do you think the dream of leaving the country has done to the Latin American writer?

I do believe that every writer, Latin American or not, has to go somewhere at some point. Traveling and writing have a lot to do with each other, both stem from the same impulse. What happens is that Latin America always had very few readers, so leaving was the only possibility. Even to publish books. When I left, they had already rejected me from the three Peruvian publishers that existed at the time. In recent years, new generations of very young readers have appeared throughout Latin America. There are more publishers and the world is less grey. Rather now I see a lot more people wanting to get out. For years friends told me why I don’t come back, if it’s good in Peru and the food is delicious. There was a contagious and beautiful optimism. Now they call me to ask me what to do to leave. And leaving at 25 is not the same as leaving at 45. To emigrate is to start a new life, to be born again. And you may not have time to live another.

─As you say in your book, many people leave Peru to live their sexuality freely, to escape the homophobia that prevails here. How do you see that invisible exodus?

When you migrate, you become several different people inhabiting a single body. One is the one you left behind, that you find every time you go back and talk to your friends. You realize that they are talking to a ghost that still exists in the other’s eyes. Another is the person you want to be, that no one else may see. And the third is what others see on the site you arrive at. A society as conflictive, repressed and violent as the Peruvian, forces you to fit into roles that are not necessarily the ones you want to assume. And many people emigrate because they want to live their sexuality in peace, looking for others to see what they are. The divorce between what you think you are and what others see is very hard. It is incredible that there are people who have to leave to be able to love, have a partner and children.

─If there is something that your stories have, it is an intention not to replicate an Aristotelian structure: more than telling a story, they are stories in which things happen. And where the characters do not change.

My novels play a lot with the literary genre, so they are very technical. Everything happens where it should happen. Perhaps writing short stories is an escape from all that. In stories, the ability to play is much greater. If someone tells you about his life, if you are a heavy storyteller like me, you think that story is full of holes, silences, and lies. We reinvent things that have not happened. And that makes them more real.

─In the story “You only tell me that you love me when you’re drunk”, you talk about a phenomenon that occurred in the 90s: a large number of successful young actors in Peru traveled to Spain looking for an opportunity. And almost all returned empty-handed. The reason, terrible, you define it like this: “it was too bank to be exotic and too Peruvian to be natural”.

The further you go, the more of a category you are and the less of a human being. Nobody knows what you really are or has time to know it, so the stereotype is used. Dealing with them is also dealing with the way people see you. In the end, you know yourself more than anyone. Even now the categories for artists are still quite narrow. Mexicans play Mexicans, Brazilians play Brazilians, and Peruvians play Peruvians. Many of the artist friends, not just actors, who emigrated and have been getting to know here, discovered in that migration how well they were doing in their country (laughs). What happens is that those of us who stayed behind did so because we were failures there. We hadn’t lost anything. If you’re going to fail, do it in the rich country. But what was really successful came back, because they had a life, an audience, an environment. Art is very difficult, and even more so for an actor. Because his art is made for the public. Unlike a writer, if you are a failure no one finds out. A writer doesn’t face an empty theater, he doesn’t have to cancel a season. Being on stage is cruel. Ordinary people need money, an artist needs to be listened to, listened to, moved by him. And that depends on the cultural codes around you.

─You told me that you had not received calls from Peruvians asking you how to migrate to Spain for a long time. How is our political crisis looking over there?

It is the first time that it is being seen. Peru has been appearing on the front pages of the press for several days, something that did not happen that I remember. It has had significant coverage. And it is completely incomprehensible to them. There is a great stupor about what is happening. Everyone tends to fix it on a fight of lefts and right, the coup leaders are the chavistas, or the coup leaders are the trumpistas. But in Peru they are all coup leaders. And the level of the entire political class is equally in question. And his agenda has nothing to do with political measures, but with business interests, when not gangsters, directly. Then it becomes incomprehensible.

─And what do you think?

It’s not a political discussion. What is happening in Peru is pre-political. In democracies it is discussed whether a government is left or right. We discuss whether it can be governed.