Mario Vargas Llosa and Isabel Preysler: This was the couple’s visit to Arequipa in 2017 | CHRONICLE

In the midst of rumors and reports that the writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the businesswoman Isabella Preysler they would have ended their relationship after eight years, we remember the first trip they made to the hometown of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Arequipa, for his 81st birthday with these two chronicles by Czar Gutiérrez.

The return to Arequipa

Against the classic blue sky, an unprecedented cloud undulates over the crater as if it were a nuptial bond: it is the perfect frame with which Arequipa receives its most illustrious son, who appears on the sleeve of the air terminal dressed in an impeccable steel blue suit The prophet is again in his land. A perfect smile synchronizes with that of her partner, a slender lady who is scorched by the kind rays of light, the same ones that her lover saw for the first time exactly 81 years ago. That was the only and brief appearance of Isabel Preysler, whose first steps could be described as tempered musicality.

The writer’s caravan, a court-martial made up of his most loyal friends, followed the leading vehicle to the third block of San Francisco Street, home of the Mario Vargas Llosa Regional Library, which has missed his presence for 365 days. Because since it was founded, six years ago, Mario has never stopped coming with a precious load each time: 2,741 books in 2014, 2,012 in 2015 and 3,030 last year, whose delivery Mario ordered his friends because he preferred to celebrate them in the Villamagna in Madrid.

Yesterday’s visit was preceded for the landing of 7 thousand volumes, between books and magazines, advance of the load greater than 15 thousand that will arrive from London, Madrid and Paris to the city that loves it the most. There was none like Arequipa to wait for him in March 2011 when he arrived with the Nobel medal and deposited it at 101 Avenida Parra, now the House-Museum where the son of Dorita and Ernesto saw the splendid brilliance that would accompany him throughout his life.

This time, the Cuerdas del Misti quartet and the Philharmonic Band preceded the entrance to a library that exhibits the exhibition dedicated to Roger Casement (1864 – 1916), Irish vigilante immortalized in “The Celtic Dream”. It was 11:58 in the morning when his figure was clearly outlined under the ashlar vault and among the shrapnel of flashes. The ceremony, particularly emotional due to the tragedy we are experiencing, began with a welcome from Yamila Osorio, regional governor who pondered the resignation and delivery of the treasure. Then the writer approached the microphone and said that yes, indeed, he was particularly hurt by the floods in Piura, where he lived three years duly recreated in his first play and in “La casa verde.”

The rest was a praise of literature: Vargas Llosa is a high priest of fiction who declaims the same creed and each time it is fascinating to listen to it: “My greatest achievement in life was learning to read, which is learning to live, to travel in geography, in time. It is meeting and making our own the heroes of Dumas, Verne or Salgari. I am sorry to part with my books, but it is a sadness that is rewarded because I know that they will be useful to my compatriots”.

But it was also a compliment to Arequipa: “Nobody like the people of Arequipa to feel the Nobel Prize as theirs. I have always felt Arequipa. I don’t like revolutions, but the ones in Arequipa were to depose tyrants, dictators. And how can I forget the massive reception that I received for the Nobel Prize. Seeing that show I decided that my books would finally come here to live among my countrymen”.

He spoke exactly 18 minutes. Immediately afterwards, the line of vehicles quickly crossed the Grau Bridge and got lost among that imbricated of sillar houses called Yanahuara. There is La Nueva Palomino, its star picantería.

At the close of this edition, the question that keeps the gossip on both sides of the pond still to be resolved: Will Isabel Preysler sink her teeth into the heart of a chactado guinea pig? Considering that the rodent may be a guinea pig, a stuffed animal or a pet, anything but edible in Spain, our next dispatch promises to solve such a mystery.

The city and its Nobel

A birthing scene floats in a holographed dimension. The interference between the referential laser and the light reflected in the characters diagram Dora and Miss Pitzer, the parturient and the midwife. The bedroom, the baby’s first howl, a manger made of light. And circumnavigating the stage, editions in all languages, unpublished photographs, medals and all that iconographic apparatus assembled in 2014. Suddenly, the interactive Vargas Llosa is next to the hyperactive Vargas Llosa, and one does not know who is who: both are composed pure fiction.

Happily, reality intervenes when an extremely beautiful lady takes the hand of the real Vargas Llosa and leads him through the old maternal home transformed into a museum script. There are 17 environments where the chronological arc flashes, traveling through the different ages of man, from Cochabamba to Barcelona, ​​and then to London and Paris, until it resolves itself into a replica of the Nobel medal. So that in the end the three of them –she, the writer and the night accomplice– draw the three-dimensional image of a kiss in HD.

Vargas Llosa’s house on Avenida Vargas Llosa has a beautiful theater where tonight fragments of four plays are staged in honor of the birthday boy: “The city and the dogs”, “Conversation in the Cathedral”, “Paradise on the other corner ” and “Antics of the bad girl”. “This is called winning with other people’s Hail Marys, all the credit belongs to this cast from Arequipa”, says the director Luis Peirano, introducing the twenty actors from the town who move scripted by Alonso Cueto, who takes the stage with a cane. Then everyone goes downstairs to shake hands with the creative brain, while the cold night is tempered with warm non-alcoholic drinks.

By the way, no act of the day compromised the use of any distillate, a nod to the idea that with MVLl the image of the drunken down jacket is closed. Nobody like him to relativize the hypersensitivity, the metaphysical gear or the mechanics of melancholy activated by an unpresentable bohemia. MVLl is work in its purest form. A brain touched by radioactivity. A creator against all odds. The probable relativization of the genius of his last of him only shows that he is a human being whose portent was sealed in the early days. Perfectly summed up when receiving the Rómulo Gallegos.

The best Peruvian cuisine burns in clay pots. Mario has just parted with 15,000 volumes from his personal library and the city thanks him with its seasoning. Thus lands on his table the most select fleet of fully identified flying saucers. The writer opts for stuffed rocoto and pumpkin chili. And his girlfriend? In Armani and stilettos, seated to the left of her famous fiancé, ‘la perla de Manila’ (66), she is advised by the poet Alonso Ruiz Rosas, culinary writer and founder of the Sociedad Picantera de Arequipa. Finally, a duck almond is brought to his lips. For dessert? Picarón and cheese ice cream.

If during the delivery of the bookish treasure he was so moved – his voice breaking, the bangs falling in curls –, in the act of the International Foundation for Freedom he looked impressive in his defense of democracy and the free market “that, for example, It made a country without natural resources like Singapore prosperous, and it led to the ruin of countries with dictatorships like those of Cuba and Venezuela.” While Mario speaks, Isabel pours out her ‘glamour’ at the Santa Catalina Convent and some shops on Calle Mercaderes devoid of the paparazzi cloud that in Spain does not leave her alone, that follows her more than Paula Echevarría, Sara Carbonero or Elsa Pataky. All much younger, of course, but seniority is class.

Until the third day when it is time to set sail. The private aircraft filters through that cloud in the form of a bridal veil that caresses the crater, and the flag writer moves away from his hometown. With a pink ashlar hippopotamus in his hands. With the extraordinary authority of someone who has won everything. Balancing between the pink kiosk and his immortality in La Pléiade de Gallimard. With the certainty of staying at the top of the canon. And then we Arequipeños do well to celebrate it: finally the Misti went ‘boom’.