It was couple of years ago. I was poor and alone. I was living in a small, dirty and cold room, with no hot water but plenty of cockroaches, at the edge of a deserted former communist city. I had no money to buy food and I was feeding myself with a local-no-taste-yogurt. I was trying to make my way at the national radio. It was a lot of work and no money. As it usually happens in former communist cities, good positions were given depending on whom you knew and how much money you were willing to “invest” in the future of your career.
I was ambitious. I was young and fool. I was thinking that success is money and public recognition. I was wrong.
That evening, I bought my usual local-no-taste-yogurt and went to my room. It was late and I was tired, but had no sleep. I would have been, probably, another night spent worrying, crying and hitting my old radio to make it work couple of minutes more.
But I was carrying a book.
I heated some water in a kettle and washed myself a little. I tried to disinfect a teaspoon of all bugs that might have been crawling on it during the day. I opened the yogurt, stuck the spoon in it and I sat it gently on the chest near the bed. I lit a small lamp and I climbed into bed. I put my clothes under the blanket, too, not to find them frozen in the following morning. I started reading.
The book I read that night was “The Storyteller” of Mario Vargas Llosa. It was the story of Saul Zuratas, a young man passionate about the life and history of a tribe in the Amazonas jungle, the Machiguengas. The novel interweaves two narratives: the present (a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon, recognizes him as his old school friend, Saul, and tries to put together the story of his life) and beautiful metaphoric stories told by the Machiguengas people (the one that touched me most was retelling that, once the white people conquered the Amazon tribes and turned free people onto slaves, the latter were committing suicide, as they understood the whites as a tremendous evil that came upon them, cause they were bad and needed to die, to wash all the bed things they might have done) As the writer goes deeper into his friend past and search for more information on the storytellers, he not only understand his friend’s choices, but makes an unbelievable discovery: the Machiguengas changed their old history and turned the story of the storyteller itself into mystery and great secrecy, as it had never happened before, in order to protect Saul’s true identity.
Discovering along with the writer Saul’s history, I’ve learned the most important lesson of my life: the poverty is only in our souls. Saul’s choice, the incredible richness of his heart, his love and passion, his dedication and decision of letting go all human pride, vanity and greed, and of losing his identity, culture and old collective believes for the Machiguengas’ extraordinary beauty he discovered and turned himself to, the unbelievable strong connection between them, changed me for good. I’ve understood then the power of love, the power of beauty and the power of following your own heart, the power of building yourself and reinventing you out of scratch. The power of choosing your own identity. When the time was right, I choose, too.
I’ll never stop thinking that, if it wasn’t that book, I would still be a poor, ambitious and stupid girl. Gracias, senor Llosa, por cambiar mi vida.
Via Wikipedia
Last evening, I’ve found out that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Congratulations!
No other winning ever made me so happy. No other winning, within the last couple of years, was so-well-deserved – Llosa is actually a writer, who actually writes books that people actually read. And love.
