This Owl does not believe in coincidences and less when it comes to the information that comes from the family of Mario Vargas Llosa. His son Álvaro has published a photo that has fallen like an ‘atomic bomb’ in the Spanish gossip press that follows the telenovela of the breakup of the engagement of our Nobel laureate and socialite Isabel Preysler.
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It is a postcard, taken in September 2022, where they appear together, very smiling, the writer with Patricia Llosa, in what remains of the great library of the novelist in the house of Barranco. This columnist knows that Álvaro is his father’s main squire, and if he published that photo, he did it with his approval.
It is a response by the novelist to the public statements of his Filipina ex-girlfriend, who stated that she broke up with him ‘because of her jealousy’. Vargas Llosa he has always had traumatic breakups with his partners.
He caused the break with the ‘Aunt Julia’ Urquidi, his first great love and first wifea, whom he left for his cousin Patricia Llosa, the second wife and mother of his three children. A Patricia abandoned her for Isabel, just days after celebrating 50 years of marriage in New York.
AUNT JULIA AND THE WRITER
His first marriage had such an impact on Arequipa that he wrote his novel ‘Aunt Julia and the writer’ (1977). There he presented the devastating criticism of a certain type of writer who writes piecework, gets lost in the thread of his convoluted stories, but keeps the massive audiences of radio theaters in suspense.
The budding ‘writer’ is the Bolivian Pedro Camacho. The world of radio dramas, the mass media of the fifties such as radio, and later the incipient television, are covered with his deeply personal history.
The vicissitudes of a 19-year-old college student aspiring writer, journalist on a radio newscast, for marrying his Bolivian aunt-in-law Julia Urquidi, ten years older than him, against the will of his caveman father and most of his family. A love story with all its lyrics.
The novel ends when both newlyweds travel to Madrid. Mario He dedicated his novel to her despite the fact that they had been divorced for more than fifteen years. What’s more, she also gave him the literary rights to the work. Julia, at that time, was a lady in her fifties who retained the attractions that drove the fledgling novelist mad.
if aunt julia he had not protested the publication of the novel, why six years later he published a response book entitled ‘What Varguitas did not say’ (1983)? There he attacks the novelist and tells intimate details of how his marriage fell apart because of his niece. Patricia Llosathe daughter of his sister Olga, a young woman who came to London to study English and stayed at the couple’s house Llosa-Urquidi.
Julia He had a lot of trouble getting the book published. Mario had published his monumental ‘The War of the End of the World’ in 1981 and was on the ‘crest of the wave’. In addition, she had three children who could be affected by seeing her mother, Patricia, described as a ‘marriage breaker’. That is why she used all her influence and no large or small publisher in Spain, Mexico or Argentina dared to publish the book at the offer of Urquidi not to collect royalties.
‘WHAT VARGUITAS DIDN’T SAY’
Just a mysterious Bolivian publisher, Khana Cruz, published ‘What Varguitas did not say’, a book that also went unnoticed even in reproductions of newspapers and magazines. Julia begins the book with her leg up. “Mario seems that since he was a child he knew how to take advantage of those who loved him.”
Julia she opens her heart and confesses that in no way did she come to suspect that, by her side, “the happiest and most intense years of my life would pass, as well as the moments of greatest sadness, disappointment and bitterness that any woman can bear”.
She was tall, good-looking, graceful, and the one she loved the least. No one predicted that a few months after they met, they would end up getting married secretly from the family, in Chincha, in the small town of Grocio Prado. The only one who helped them in this reckless odyssey was their dear friend Javier (Silva Ruete), future Minister of Economy.
According to the book, Julia played a very important role in Mario’s career, since he corrected misspellings at night and talked with him about the plausibility of the characters in ‘The City and the Dogs’. She says that she was the one who encouraged him to submit the novel to the Biblioteca Breve de Seix Barral contest.
“I was absolutely sure that Mario would win the prize. For Mario it would be his first step on the path he would have to follow, but now with firmer steps, with a good start. But fame, success and money came along with infidelities that he could not hide.
Julia points out of Mario: “If I want to be honest until the end, I have something to thank you for. She taught me a lot in life; with him I got to know love for love’s sake, I got to know many aspects of the human being… I went through all the stages of feelings and passions, lies and humiliation…”. Who would have imagined that, decades later, the preysler He was going to evict our award-winning writer from his mansion. I turn off the TV.
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