Aunt Preysler and the Writer: when will Vargas Llosa’s novel about Isabel

Vargas Llosa’s writer aunt, Julia Urquidi, had not turned 30 when she divorced to marry her nephew, who had not turned 20. They lived together for almost a decade in places as fascinating as Paris in the mid-fifties, until the Peruvian left his aunt because he had fallen in love with his cousin, Patricia Llosa Urquidi, also a niece by his first wife. The story is well known because there are two autobiographical books that tell it. Mario Vargas Llosa published 13 years after her first divorce Aunt Julia and the writer, memorable Nobel work. Five years later, Julia Urquidi gave her version in another book entitled What Varguitas did not sayaccording to what was narrated by the ex-boyfriend of Isabella Preysler.

Also read – Isabel Preysler wanted to marry Vargas Llosa and he refused: the real reasons for their breakup

It is very relevant to remember these novels for several reasons. First, because Vargas Llosa has often written about his experiences, sometimes the most intimate ones. And it wouldn’t be surprising if life gives him the time he needs, we find ourselves in the kiosks something similar to Aunt Preysler and the writer. It’s a saying. but remember so much Aunt Julia and the writer as the ‘sequel’ published by Urquidi is also relevant because with the portrait we obtain of the extraordinary writer from Arequipa reading those biographies we can project something of the complex and fascinating personality that surrounds the author of Pantaleon and the visitors.

We know that you have always liked women as much as writing. Bedridden and recently married to his aunt, ten years his senior, he was unfaithful as many times as he wanted; until he fell madly in love with his cousin, who became his wife, mother of his three children, his essential pillar and organizer of his life for half a century, until the writer fell in love with Isabel Preysler and divorced again .

Adventures aside, we know that Mario Vargas Llosa has traveled, in terms of love and passion, from fantasy to fantasy. In his mid-50s, almost as a teenager, his fantasy was his aunt, ten years his senior. And he lived that fantasy with such intensity as to marry her through thick and thin, with great family opposition precisely because Julia and Mario were aunt and nephew. But Mario did not mind the difficulties.

When the infidelities took their toll on the relationship between uncle and niece, and the flame of that passion faded, Mario could not resign himself to another fantasy: his cousin. And this one was intense because Patricia Llosa has been, with the permission of any of the other people who have passed through the heart of the writer, the woman of his life: half a century of marriage. And the other great fantasy of Vargas Llosa has been the Preysler.

Isabel has implied that the writer’s “unfounded” jealousy, a feeling that seems to be repetitive, has been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the main reason for the breakup. But Tamara’s mother also comes to say that her Mario has never stopped looking at other women. Perhaps Mario Vargas Llosa’s jealousy has something to do with a certain bad conscience of the writer, which is why the thief believes that everyone is of his condition, a saying that we can version with that the banner believes that everyone is of his condition. .

It is true that Mario is not that 19-year-old Adonis capable of seducing a woman ten years older, his own aunt, nor is he the thirty-year-old who abandoned his aunt to marry his cousin. But it does not seem that the writer is a man fond of sentimental solitude, although 87 chestnuts fall on him in March.

Nor has Isabel been without a partner. Preysler’s sentimental life, much better known even than that of Vargas Llosa, can be summed up in three marriages and a relationship of almost eight years with the Peruvian. She has never been known to lightly cheat on the Filipina, no matter how much her relationship with Miguel Boyer may have overlapped with her marriage to Carlos Falco. However, about infidelity, as a cuckold victim, a woman who was married for seven years to Julio Iglesias, father of her first three children. Her marriage to Tamara’s father, which barely lasted five years, was shipwrecked to a certain extent because Isabel is anything but a country woman, almost the opposite of a socialite. But if Patricia Llosa has been the woman of his life for Vargas Llosa, Miguel Boyer, the Filipina’s third husband and father of Ana, her youngest daughter, may have been the essential man in Preysler’s life. Her marriage lasted a quarter of a century, much longer than the sum of the previous two, and only ended with the death of the former Socialist Finance Minister, whom Isabel cared for in the most complicated moments of her long illness with self-sacrifice. and sacrifice.

Hopefully Mario Vargas Llosa has the courage, desire and time to delight us with a novel focused on his years of relationship with Isabel. We don’t know if it will hit bookstores Aunt Preysler and the Writer but we can assure without fear of being wrong that if it is published, with whatever title, it will sell more editions than any other work by the writer.