“Every night, it seems incredible, since I committed the folly of leaving my wife, I think of her and remorse assails me. I think there was only one thing I did wrong in life: abandoning Carmencita for a woman who wasn’t worth it (…). Every night I think of her and I ask her forgiveness,” says Mario Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 86 years old) in The windsa story with autobiographical overtones that he wrote more than two years ago and that he published in Free Letters in 2021. In this story, the Nobel Prize for Literature tells the story of a man who is reaching the twilight of his life, a disillusioned man who regrets having left his wife for another. “I already forgot the name of that woman for whom I abandoned Carmencita. I never wanted her. It was a violent and fleeting infatuation, one of those crazy things that destroy a life. For doing what I did, my life was destroyed and I was never happy again (…). It was a crush on pichula, not from the heart. Of that pichula that it is no longer useful to me, except to pee”, continues the Spanish-Peruvian writer in his story.
The publication of The winds went unnoticed by the general public, but not by the intimate environment of the author of works such as The party of the goat Y Aunt Julia and the writer, who saw in this story signs of the apparent fatigue that Vargas Llosa was already feeling then after seven years of living together with Isabel Preysler (Manila, Philippines, 71 years old). The fictional story is littered with clues that lead to reality. There are the repeated veiled references to his ex-wife: Carmen is the first name of Patricia Llosa, the previous wife of the Nobel and mother of her three children. Criticism of a certain frivolous and showbiz high society can also be read between the lines: “It is impossible to enjoy a concert, or an opera, or even a light comedy, surrounded by people who do nothing more than type or caress the tablets under their the eyes”. The writer’s discomfort in the face of media overexposure and what he himself called, following in the wake of French philosopher Guy Debord, “the civilization of the spectacle” is palpable: “Sometimes I think that, without realizing it, what happens around me It is contaminating me too and I no longer really know how to distinguish between what is culture and what it takes its place in the crazy world in which we now live”. And the tiredness of him and boredom of him for a social agenda as intense as it is monotonous: “Dinner impressed me a lot, it’s true, not because of the food, nothing special, but because of the holograms. All night we were surrounded by these ghostly characters, doubling as waiters or waitresses, serving the table, passing the platters with snacks and drinks.” In fiction, the protagonist manages to flee from that dystopian world and takes refuge in his old house, on Calle de la Flora in Madrid, which is the house where Vargas Llosa lived with his cousin and ex-wife, Carmen Patricia Llosa. .
“When we read The winds, we saw the clear autobiographical references and also the references to his relationship with Isabel, although of course he does not use her name by any means”, explains a person from Vargas Llosa’s closest entourage in conversation with EL PAÍS. “This story was finished writing in December 2020, two years ago. So the crisis with Isabel comes from afar. It has not been something sudden or unexpected, as has been said. The deterioration of the relationship, the doubts, the regret, the dissatisfaction… all this had been brewing for a long time. The tabloids have always presented them as an idyllic couple, but they went from something idyllic a long time ago to something less happy and more complicated”, continues the same source.
In the month of June of this year, Mario Vargas Llosa and the widow of Minister Miguel Boyer suffered their first major crisis. As EL PAÍS has learned, at the beginning of the summer he left the house she has in the Puerta de Hierro urbanization and returned to her apartment in the center of the capital. Shortly after, he returned to the mansion of the so-called “queen of hearts” on Miraflores avenue. So they denied the breakup rumors, but the differences were there. “There were no jealous attacks, as has been said. That is false. This has been the culmination of deterioration ”, they insist.
This newspaper has tried to contact Isabel Preysler. “The lady is out of the country”, explained an employee who works in one of the most famous houses in Spain, so many times portrayed in the pages of Hello!. “Mario and I have decided to end our relationship definitively. I don’t want to give any more statement, ”she told the aforementioned magazine on Wednesday, her leading publication for 50 years.
In the writer’s circle they describe the couple as “two people from very different worlds.” And they talk about two reasons that precipitated the break. The first, the discrepancies in their interests and lifestyles, the lack of common plans. “They were incompatible. He is interested in culture and she is interested in entertainment. There is an abyss between the two.” The second is more of an impression. “He already seemed to feel uncomfortable seeing his image turned into an ornament, a claim for parties, events and even for the documentary of Isabel’s daughter, Tamara Falcó,” they say.
Friends of one and the other agree that both tried to adapt to their respective worlds. But culture and entertainment are antagonistic universes. “At first, Mario was even amused from an anthropological point of view, although he was never comfortable in that area,” they admit. The Nobel prize went so far as to say that he submitted to the inns, the exclusives and the photocalls “for love”. “If I could choose it, I would not want to appear in the Hello!. Now I appear in the magazine for personal reasons. But if you have the recipe for not appearing, tell me,” he asked a journalist at the press conference to present his novel five cornersin 2016. In that same act, he defined Hello! as the serialized novel of the 21st century. “It is a cultural phenomenon of our time. There are millions of people who want something that makes them dream and that before offered the novel and poetry. now offers it Hello! with enormous talent,” he said. His words surprised the cultural press that covered the event, which was still very much aware of The civilization of the spectacle. In In that 2012 essay, the thinker defined gossip journalism as a “frivolous” industry, “without aesthetic values”, dominated by “the carnival of liars”.
During these years, that same press insisted on portraying the Preysler-Llosa couple as a happy couple. Or was it the couple themselves who insisted on showing themselves like this to the flashes. But the signs of wear had been surfacing for some time. She did not accompany him to the last literary congress on his work, held a few months ago in the city of Florence, nor to the recent premiere of a montage of tales of the plague in Catania, Sicily. “Isabel preferred to go to the Maldives,” they conclude.
Hello! says that Preysler is sad and convinced that there is no going back. The Nobel environment says that he is very well physically, mentally and emotionally. He “he is in good spirits and working on a new novel”. Vargas Llosa has written again in his apartment at Madrid de los Austrias. At the end of The winds, the story he published in 2021, the protagonist manages to reach his old house, the royal house of Vargas Llosa, “where Flora street meets Hileras street and touches the tiny Plaza de San Martín, which will later become in the Plaza de las Descalzas”. “I did not have the key that opens the large gate where I live (…). However, I was lucky. After only 10 or 15 minutes of waiting, a man with a cane appeared, whom I half recognized. He stood by the door and took out a key and opened it.” As if Mario Vargas Llosa had recognized Mario Vargas Llosa.
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