April 18, 2025

In order to fabricate, [you] always need the trampoline of reality.

Mario Vargas Llosa, titan of Spanish-language literature and arguably the most popular member of the Boom, died Sunday. He was eighty-nine years old, nearly one hundred.

On a trip somewhere once you brought Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. You remember reading it on a plane. It was good, you still think so.

The city that care forgot has a bookstore that wears that neglect, crumbling stone and rotted wood, where you found The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, and you read it poolside at some hotel/spa in the middle of Irish Channel. You didn’t finish it.

All we really have to look forward to is old age, even though it’s not guaranteed. For a writer, old age is golden. Think of all the stories, the secrets, memories and dreams that fill the years, the ones that rack up like on a speedometer and course through us like the marrow in our bones.

Vargas Llosa was charming and coherent in at least three languages, reflecting distinct attributes of his personality. What avenues had he gone down, what doors did he slip through— both in the metaphorical sense of language being a world of its own, a house if you will, that grows the more you learn the language, entering into new rooms, and down long stretches like halls where nothing much changes but you’re getting by, and the literal ones, the societal and political, private and professional.

What language does is identify, giving weight and value to the world around us. It is what establishes the known world, covering everything we see (or know of, like the inside of our minds), and is rampant and communicable. The Nobel committee cited Vargas Llosa’s “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat" upon hos receiving the prize in Literature in 2010.

“If you know only one language, you live only once,” the proverb goes, and it makes you think of the Argentine and the random ladies that speak Spanish where you work on the bistro waitstaff.

You cannot believe what you’re seeing. Life is what you hear second hand, but reality you face on your own.

It’s a danse macabre in a perfumed and expensive waiting room. Like college or a day care— you’d think it’d be wilder.

There’s a dining room lined with cheap carpeting and tall velvet curtains. If they were open it would be like the Colorado Lounge, or better.

The Argentine is rumored to have been a doctor, and is haughty like one from Argentina, proudly prodding with her cane with her head down in concentration, sure of where she’s going. There’s a Chilean woman, and a former Paramount studios executive who got fluent living in Peru for a year. You serve their food sin comentario.

There’s a white lady, last name Alvarez. You tell her you’re Dominican

(they (everyone) always asks the same way: where are you from? Like you just left, like you’re panting and your eyes are restless, taking everything in, because you just got here. It’s a question you’ve come to answer rather literally, directly if not a bit obtusely.)

and she says she lived in Santo Domingo with her husband, a structural engineer, right after Trujillo was assassinated. She makes angry and confused faces and leaves forks on the floor like she works for Michelin.

What is it? It’s the golden oldies playing in the hall, the swinging hips of West Indian nurses behind pushed wheelchairs; it’s the hungry stares and crowd by the doors before seating. Yentas and old Irish grandmothers— who knows how they afford their $15k a month apartments with a view of Hempstead Harbor (their husband’s pensions, they say, but grandpa’s been dead a long time, having died young. He too was fond of asking questions).

An incurable dreaminess is what brought you here. You’ve done your thousand hours with Kitchen Confidential, listening with sweet delusion, imagining the pressed uniforms, the sweat from the grill rolling off your brow, the capability and the economy of motion. Passion can only go so far.

In the kitchen there are group of three or four men behind the stove that are more like a pit crew. The food is already prepared, simmering since the morning. All they do is assemble, boiling spinach or asparagus when asked, whipping out third and fourth trays and tubs of sauce out from reach-ins. They titter and hoot like hyenas in between rapid fire exchanges of obscene jokes. One claims that women with big dogs end up fucking them, and makes motion like he’s pounding on a door with the back of his fist.

Hags with their faces drawn on and all dolled up but they fall apart when you ask them where they are or their names. Toothless bags of vacuum packed skin to bone, faces pulled back or down, either way their eyes are fucked, exposed or too small, or wide, like when you squeeze a cat’s face in the throes of cuteness aggression and you see their irises, like in a cartoon. The way they look at you, on some you’ve-aways been-the-caretaker-type shit. Dinner is a big event. Those who survived the night, the next round who appear, communing like its the debut of Lady Sybil’s frock.

This isn’t like Green Mile kind of charming, or at least it hasn’t been yet. Maybe when the thaw comes and they’re herded outside with their sweaters on (Can you believe this? In June?) their disposition softens.

There’s a few like Tuco’s uncle, their eyes screaming and their mouths puckered, stooped over blowing bubbles in soup, trying managing on their own. Some are just batty, smiling about absolutely nothing, not even aware of it, or you, preoccupied thinking that they’re thinking thoughts.

You can only hope the twilight of your years will be spent by the water, just not here, and if by then you’re adrift in your thoughts that they’re the stories you lived yourself and have passed on— the only way to truly escape death.