By Eduardo Garcia Aguilar few hours ago, when I was in a coffee bar in Saint Germain de Prés Leff drinking beer near my favorite bookstores, I cross the street front spring on Friday, Mario Vargas Llosa a true American institution. He was alone and slowly crossed the boulevard, very elegant, with superb light blue jacket and beige trousers, no doubt recently purchased for the season, perfect from head to toe from fine designer clothes, but no tie, and with an aura unmistakable joy, comfort and fulfillment. He brought snowy white hair shining in the sun and carried a red bag full of heavy books on the left hand that made him stumble. He walked awkwardly, as they do the writers who have spent their lives sitting in front of the machine and that both seem to be in that position to load the history of all the chairs in the world. He looked happy end of April this cool and sunny, everyone waving happiness at the departure of winter and the proximity of the long summer season.
girls dump their coats and go with light clothing and increasingly tight sexy and flirty scented, hanging from their phones, and everyone, young and old, waving in the streets or looking forward windows heating in the coffee talking, as if from the end of hibernation. How come not to walk on Friday April 28 between streets and terraces that were passed to all genres of France and abroad and the way to visit the shelves to see what's new? Vargas
Llosa was seen in its perfect habitat to pause a moment to breathe the air perfumed with flowers, leaves and shoots recently, in that corner that frequent since 1958, when at 21 he was in Paris looking to meet with Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus , the fashionable French Nobel Prize in those early days of the mid-twentieth century. Here, apart from some very knowledgeable French teacher, student or Latin American tourists, no one recognized in the street and can walk freely and in their old days, but already become a solid and venerable old man much more than prosperous, covered by all awards , accolades and honors as possible.
I suddenly realized to see him cross toward the café de Flore, facing the most ancient church of Saint Germain, in the small plaza Beauvoir-Sartre, the author of the Hero, The Green House and Pantoja and the Special is already 70 years age. That eternal youth born in 1936 that drew on history and success over several generations and was always on the front page of the discussion, crossed the seventh decade on the streets of the Latin Quarter, not far from his home in the Jardin de Luxembourg, is, say, one of his secret shelters to escape the celebrity in Spain, where newspapers take their picture every day and every week is reported to have received a new $ 50,000 prize in Berlin Jerusalem, London, Cali, Buenos Aires or New York, or an honorary doctorate in Tasmania or Yakutia. All this deserves it, he has been the most diligent of the authors of the boom: excellent writer, very entertaining for all, essayist rigor, an expert on Flaubert, or the novels of chivalry, columnist and pamphleteer of fear, always makes the task as be without any failure, regardless of the hours you take the job. Vargas Llosa is a real institution in France, and French and its largest publisher, Gallimard's prestigious and lofty, they want it and spoil it even more than yours. Beer term thinking about all those things, like the first time I saw him at the Festival Teatro de Manizales in the early 70's of last century, when Maoists attacked a vociferous in college and had to be defended by a very young Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda or a cocktail of International PEN Club Congress in 2003 in the palace de Bellas Artes in Mexico, amid a crowd of rich women who smiled at him, so tired and fed up of travel.
Vargas Llosa, to which every teenager wanted to imitate and follow, the same blows that hit Garcia Marquez in Mexico, ending with a passionate friendship and ostracized the tome of his thesis on the Colombian Call History a Deicide. In any thought that at the end of Leff and I went through the same route to the library.
There, in the place of news, Gallimard presents a book that just came out in honor of his 70th birthday and 40 have been published in French The City and the Dogs. In the preface, Antoine Gallimard celebrates the freshness of its seven decades, said that the publishing house could not pass the time, so the volume is filled with pictures of children, adolescents and youth of this man who loves and is loved by France.
The Peruvian, Inca, the boy who at 60 worked at the Agence France Presse and addressed to Albert Camus timidly coming out of a theater. A great writer, a legend who has lived by and for the literature and has even had the luxury of wanting to be president and fail, fortunately, in the attempt.
----------------------------------------------- -
* Reproduced in Homenaje a Mario Vargas Llosa on the day of his Nobel, after nearly 60 years of typing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment