When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.
The novel’s quixotic hero is a music journalist called Toño Azpilcueta. Toño always hoped to be a professor of Peruvian music, but as the novel opens, he’s earning a meagre living teaching at a girls’ school and writing articles for specialist magazines. Luckily, he’s subsidised by his longsuffering wife, Matilde. Toño is a recognisable type: the impecunious cultural obsessive. If he were British, he would be fanatical about free jazz, or some obscure Delta bluesman. But this is Peru and Toño’s particular infatuation is the vals, a Peruvian musical style that fuses the European waltz with African and indigenous Latin American traditions.
One evening, Toño gets an invitation to see an unknown guitarist called Lalo Molfino, who blows him away with his incredible virtuosity. Before Toño has time to digest the musician’s brilliance, he learns of his sudden death. With the help of a small gift of money from a friend, Toño embarks on a project to write a biography of Molfino. “This book would be an homage to his talent, but also much more: he would at last put to paper those ideas about the Peruvian vals he had entertained so often.”
Toño’s Big Idea is that the vals is going to save Peru, and possibly humanity. Its blended heritage, he explains, points a way past the trauma that colonialism, racism, dictatorship and terrorism have inflicted on his country. Toño’s quest to write the book involves sleuthing, research, interviews, a journey along Peru’s Pacific coast to Molfino’s birthplace, and battles with his own demons – in particular, a phobia about rats.
Coming to this book with, I think, the median British knowledge of Peru (Machu Picchu, the Shining Path, ceviche, Paddington Bear), it took me a moment to orient myself. I knew nothing about the country’s music and I didn’t realise that Cecilia Barraza, an important recurring character, is a real-life Peruvian singer. (It’s a bit like having Patti Smith turn up in a novel.) Nor did I clock to begin with that the novel is really two books in one. The odd-numbered chapters are a third-person account of Toño’s attempt to research and write the biography. Most of the even-numbered chapters are excerpts from the final work, I Give You My Silence. These end up forming a quirky primer on Peruvian music and culture. It includes essays on the history of the vals; the lives of the musicians who created it; the cajon, a distinctive Peruvian percussion instrument; Spanish as a regional lingua franca; and huachafería, a concept that Toño sees as a key part of Peru’s identity. Huachafería holds huge significance for both Toño and Vargas Llosa. The novel’s translator, Adrian Nathan West, tells us in a helpful afterword that “dictionaries typically define it as pretension”. Toño is much more effusive: “Huachafería can be brilliant, but it is rarely intelligent: it is intuitive, verbose, solemn, melodic, imaginative and above all maudlin.”
This is, in fact, a perfect description of the book that Toño himself is writing, which includes the grandiose and impossible claim that “this book you hold in your hands, reader, will be the starting point of a true revolution that will pull our Peru up from poverty and sorrow, restoring its glory and its creativity, making it a place where all are truly equal and putting an end to the sad divisions of its people”.
Toño’s mission is clearly bonkers, but he approaches it with a heroic single-mindedness that wins the reader over. And the form the novel takes allows Vargas Llosa to have his cake and eat it too: giving Toño space to explore his ideas in detail, while simultaneously having fun pointing out how overheated they are.
For instance, one of Toño’s chapters tells the story of a love affair between Toni Lagarde and Lala Solórzano, a white man from a middle-class neighbourhood and a poor black woman from a rough one. Thanks to a shared interest in music, they meet, fall in love and get married. For Toño the polemicist, it’s proof of the redemptive power of the vals. But Toni and Lala reappear through the novel as he works on his book, gently pushing back at Toño’s efforts to make them emblematic of anything. “You’re the only ones who are free. And music opened your eyes. It made you two aware,” Toño tells them. “You’ve got a theory there, but there are lots of theories,” is Toni’s tactful answer. In another chapter, a psychiatrist who’s helping Toño deal with his rat phobia gives his book a much more savage assessment, calling it “a pointless, incoherent mass of undeveloped ideas”.
Vargas Llosa’s own implied verdict on Toño’s idiosyncratic attempt to save the world by writing a book about Peruvian music is more nuanced and tender. Vargas Llosa, of course, shared his central character’s idealism. At the time the novel takes place, in the early 1990s, Vargas Llosa was also on a failed mission to save Peru, running unsuccessfully to become his country’s president. And just as Toño sees something poignant and important in the maligned quality of huachafería, Vargas Llosa finds heroism in his unworldly protagonist.
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Gentle, impractical dreamers like Toño, he seems to be saying, bring their own kind of changes into the world. One small proof of this is that by the novel’s end, I had followed Toño up the Pacific coast of Peru on Google Maps to the tiny settlement of Puerto Etén, tried to find a recipe for Lala’s quince marmalade online, made a vals playlist on Spotify and searched the prices of return flights to Lima. If I ever make it there, I’ll be sure to pack this fascinating and engaging book.
