Conversation at Princeton by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PIURA

RG: Who Killed Palomino Molero? is also set in the region of Piura, a city that appears in several of your novels and also in your memoir. Can you talk to us about the importance of that place in your work?

MVLL: My relationship with Piura, that city in the north of Peru, close to the border with Ecuador, is very important. Curiously, it has left quite a mark on me: I lived in Piura for only two years, which weren’t even entire years, but school years. I arrived when I was ten or eleven and studied fifth grade there, in the Salesian Fathers school, and later the last year of elementary school in San Miguel de Piura, at a state school. I spent just a few months there, and nevertheless I have written so much about that city: my novels The Green House and The Discreet Hero are set there; as are at least three of the five tales in The Cubs and Other Stories, my first book of stories; and the play La Chunga.

Piura left a great mark on me, and I couldn’t explain why. The same thing happened with a two-week trip I made to the Amazon in the year 1958, but that made such an impression on me that I wrote three books inspired by that experience. Piura left an enormous number of images in my memory that have later been starting points for stories.

Why Piura? Perhaps because my first memories of Peru take place there. Although I was born in Arequipa, my family moved with me when I was a year old—I have no memories of the city in which I was born—and I spent my entire childhood in Bolivia. As happens with expatriate families, mine lived with great nostalgia and dreamed of returning to Peru. I grew up with that longing and, when I could, the first city I lived in was Piura. The landscape, which contrasted so much with the Andean sierra of Cochabamba, made quite an impression on me. Piura was surrounded by deserts, and sand rained down on the houses. It was a very small city, and from the corners you could see the desert, and the landscape changed as the wind broke down and remade the sand dunes.

I arrived in Piura when I was ten years old and recall that my classmates mocked my accent because I spoke like a Bolivian, like a serranito, a kid from the highlands. They would bother me, saying “sh, sh, sh,” because people from the highlands pronounce “s” like “sh.” “Sherrano, you’re a sherrano,” they would say to me, mocking my way of speaking. I would ask my mother, “If I’m Peruvian, why do they make fun of me?” They made me feel like a foreigner, and that was very painful to me.

Piura was also linked to a certain age of innocence. Until the age of ten, I was completely naïve about sexual matters, something that at the time was very common in Peru and in Bolivia, in contrast to today, when ten-year-old kids already know everything.

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