A utopian dream of reconciliation through music
LE DEDICO MI SILENCIO MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 312pp. Alfaguara. Paperback, €19.85.
THE PERUVIAN NOVELI ST Mario Vargas Llosa, who turns 88 later this month, has announced that Le dedico mi silencio (“I Dedicate My Silence to You”) will be his last novel, its title perhaps a nod to his faithful readers.
In the novel the same words are spoken by the fictional guitarist Lalo Molfino, who is dying of TB, when he takes leave of the real-life Peruvian singer Cecilia Barraza. “I dedicate my silence to you”, he says, and not without irony: Barraza has had him dismissed from her band for a pattern of unruly behaviour that outweighed his musical genius.
The title also alludes to those moments in the performance of music when an audience falls reverentially silent. Such a moment occurs when Toño Azpilcueta, an expert on Peruvian folk music, hears Molfino play. A sequence of notes reminds him of those occasions in a bullfight when matador and bull are locked in struggle, instances of “complicity between the sword and the animal”. Silence follows an artist’s retirement, but it also describes the rapt response of an audience to a great performance.
If this novel proves to be Vargas Llosa’s swan song, then it is hard to imagine a better one. It deploys a subtle, self-deprecating humour, as though nothing about it were really serious, when much clearly is. Toño is especially dedicated to the Peruvian vals, or waltz, a dance that bears little resemblance to its Viennese namesake and which (he tells us) emerged spontaneously from Lima’s sordid alleyways. Nobody invented the vals, everybody loves it, and it has the potential, or so Toño believes, to bring Peruvians together at a time when the country is being torn apart by Shining Path guerrillas. He decides to develop this idea by writing a book on Molfino himself – a difficult task, as only a handful of people met the guitarist or heard him play. As a subject Molfino is elusive: did the concert Toño recalls even take place? We know that Toño is plagued by hallucinations. Could he have imagined it?
Toño is an idealist, married to the down-to-earth Matilde, with whom he has two daughters. Matilde pays the household bills as laundress and seamstress. Since she doesn’t share her husband’s passion for folk music, he has to discuss the ideas for his book with Barraza, the singer for whom he nurses a secret love (and whom Matilde loathes). In Le dedico mi silencio the chapters alternate between drafts of Toño’s book and the narrator’s description of his efforts to w
