According to Mario Vargas Llosa, his novel I dedicate my silence to you It is the last, not only in the sense that it is the latest, but with it his literary career ends. In good Peruvian language, with this work number twenty, published by the Alfaguara publishing house, the famous 87-year-old writer ends the joke.

The novel is about a misunderstood scholar, Antonio Azpilcueta, who writes articles about national music in minor publications. He defends the theory that the Peruvian waltz can integrate different layers of Peruvian society and wants to write a book that proves his thesis. He intends to use the life of the virtuoso guitarist Lalo Molfino, who was born in Puerto Eten, as the guiding thread of his story, and to do so, he travels to this town of 2,500 inhabitants in the deserts of northern Peru. The aim of the scientists is, among other things, to confirm whether the musician was really rescued from the port garbage dumps when he was a baby.

But the real character of this novel is not Azpilcueta or Molfino, but the Peruvian or Creole waltz, as a genre that unites the inhabitants of the southern country. It is suggested that the solution to national problems does not come from political parties or their government plans, but through the creation of a musical genre that manages to direct the energy of all Peruvians in one direction. The Peruvian waltz would be an element that could cause a social revolution and break down prejudices in order to unite the entire country in a fraternal and mestizo embrace.

(…) takes advantage… to underline the importance of one’s own music in solving national issues.

In one of the passages of the novel, it is pointed out that during the 1940s, the death of Carlos Gardel happened at a time when tango was gaining popularity in Paris as well, and his songs were becoming even more popular. In Peru, the tango threatened the popularity of the Creole waltz, and then Peruvian composers reacted patriotically to contain the invasion. Through new compositions, they put the tango in its place and reintroduced the waltz as the most popular dance song.

According to Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian waltz is a mixture of the Spanish dance called zamacueca and the Austrian waltzes of Strauss. It is interesting that this mixture of European genres took place on the outskirts of Lima, in almost marginal districts. Despite their humble origins, these songs also excited the upper layers of Lima.

This last novel does not have the caliber of Vargas Llosa’s best works, such as Conversation in the Cathedral or Aunt Julia and the Writer. However, the author uses the remnants of his literary career to emphasize the importance of his own music in solving national issues. In this sense, Vargas Llosa places music above literature, in terms of its ability to create a country’s identity.

Here it is worth quoting Gabriel García Márquez, who, like Vargas Llosa, is the holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he declared that music refutes, with its unlimited power, the biblical nonsense of the Tower of Babel. (OR)