I was walking down a street in Barranco with a new friend--an old journalist who’s been writing in Lima his whole life--when another old man pulled up on his bicycle and started talking to us ecstatically: Mario Vargas Llosa had just won the Nobel Prize. We bought a few bottles of Pilsen and made our way to “the oldest house in Barranco” (says Marco), a cozy two-story duplex, full of paintings by the art professor who lived there. Her hair was still flaming red despite her age. She served us a delicious lunch of pasta as we toasted Mario Vargas Llosa over and over again. It was a happy afternoon, one of the best I’ve had on this trip.
When I went to the jungle, I knew I had to find a novel by Vargas Llosa about the region. He’s written several. So I started at the beginning. The Green House was written in 1965. Though he’s written a dozen more, Vargas Llosa’s first three novels (Time of the Hero, The Green House, Conversation in the Cathedral) have always been hailed as a kind of triad of early masterpieces. In respect to form, The Green House resembles nothing like a sophomore effort. The style is never complacent. The book is divided into five parts, which in turn are split between four different storylines which eventually converge. There are extremely creative passages which I’m tempted to call “stream-of-consciousness” but technically cannot, because the voice doesn’t belong to any of the characters. The narrative is challenging. At times the setting will change mid-paragraph, demanding close attention. It is disjointed, spans decades, and crisscrosses Northern Peru back and forth from the Amazon to the Sechura Desert, following the tumbling misadventures of a large cast of characters (some of whom are the same person, though only perceptive readers will pick up on this before late in the story),
Bonafacia is an indigenous Aguaruna girl stolen from her people to be “civilized” by a convent of nuns in the frontier town of Santa Maria de Nieva. The nuns are severe, decrepit, but by contrasting them with the cruel and corrupt civil and military authorities, Vargas Llosa shows us that their motivation truly is holiness and justice, not profit and domination. Despite the nuns’ dedicated efforts to reclaim her from the darkness, Bonafacia, their servant girl, suddenly betrays them by helping children at the convent escape. The act sets off a series of events where Bonafacia is handed off from party to party. Her identity as a civilized person is always at stake. Bonafacia’s very nativeness is an object of fixation for all those want to dominate her. Nuns are repulsed by it; men are drawn to it. Will this be her salvation or her undoing?
The other jungle storyline is presented to us as a dialogue between two mysterious characters floating slowly down a river. Fushía, an invalid, is full of bitterness at his ill fortune; he is cared for by the older Alquilino. With Alquilino as his inexhaustibly patient audience, Fushía bitterly recounts the saga of his doomed exploits as a renegade rubber baron, selling contraband rubber to axis countries during WWII and in general just doing one horrible thing after another.
On the other side of the Andes, in the desert town of Piura, three friends await the return the long-absent fourth member of their quartet. Lituma has been gone for a long time; as the celebration begins, his friends dread telling him that a certain someone is now in a brothel.
So what is the Green House? If you guessed that it’s a brothel, you’re right, but which brothel? Brothels reflect the main qualities of jungle: full of sex and hard luck stories, crude affection and savagery. In this final dimension of the plot, Vargas Llosa takes on an entirely different style: a historical tale in sepia tone, polished, ironic and fabulous, reminiscent more of Melville than Faulkner. You almost feel as if you’re being rewarded for sifting through the choppy stream of images and dialogue that comprise the other parts of the book. We are taken back somewhere earlier in the twentieth century, when an eccentric bohemian arrives unexpectedly in the sand-coated, mass-attending colonial town of Piura. Don Anselmo, as he calls himself, is relentlessly buoyant, mephistophelian, wild, full of joy de viex, and apparently has deep pockets. After a period of aimless carousing, he suddenly begins constructing a building on the edge of town, a big green building, a brothel.
The success of the Green House catches everyone off guard. Suddenly appetite appears where it never showed its face before--and the only man untouched by it is the indignant Father García. Despite the priest’s political crusades against the Green House, it is clear that he is no match for Don Anselmo, whose success is fueled by the boundless lust of the Piurans, whose eros will not be put back in its cage. But Don Alnselmo is not invincible. His downfall comes as a plot twist, followed and explained by one of the most beautiful passages in the book. Don Anselmo’s weakness shows us Vargas Llosa’s appreciation for the contradictory nature of life, and the phenomenon that charismatic people usually have the most bizarre secrets.
Like his other early novels, Vargas Llosa’s tone here is extremely pessimistic. The English translation of the second line of his next novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, is: “At what point exactly had Peru fucked itself?” A young Vargas Llosa is attempting to show, with brutal realism, the backwardness of his country, the culture of machismo, the oafish force of the military, the obnoxious self-righteousness of the church. What this kind of novel inevitably lacks are three-dimensional characters, people complex enough to feel like real human brings. For much of the novel the nuns, soldiers, rubber barons and indians are hideous to the point of being caricatures. Feminist critics will grow tired of the portrayals of women as constantly victimized, whimpering, cloying, jealous. On the other hand, it is an act of assertion (her freeing the children from the mission) for which Bonafacia can never be forgiven, which sets her off down a path of endless subjugation to men.
The fundamental question that The Green House asks is: Can men love women without destroying them? For a young Peruvian writer in the 1960s, the answer is apparently “Not here, at least.”
Outstanding review!
ReplyDelete