Excerpts from novels by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Storyteller
1990
I came to Firenze to forget Peru and the Peruvians for a while, and suddenly my unfortunate country forced itself upon me this morning in the most unexpected way. I had visited Dante’s restored house, the little Church of San Martino del Véscovo, and the lane where, so legend has it, he first saw Beatrice, when, in the little Via Santa Margherita, a window display stopped me short: bows, arrows, a carved oar, a pot with a geometric design, a mannequin bundled into a wild cotton cushma. But it was three or four photographs that suddenly brought back to me the flavour of the Peruvian jungle. The wide rivers, the enormous trees, the fragile canoes, the frail huts raised up on pilings, and the knots of men and women, naked to the waist and daubed with paint, looking at me unblinkingly from the glossy prints.
Naturally, I went in. With a strange shiver and the presentiment that I was doing something foolish, that mere curiosity was going to jeopardise in some way my well-conceived and, up until then, well-executed plan – to read Dante and Machiavelli and look at Renaissance paintings for a couple of months absolute solitude – and precipitate one of those personal upheavals that periodically make chaos of my life. But, naturally, I went in.