'Felice's Names': Juan Gabriel Vásquez's new book that rewrites sadness

Here is Feliza's Names , an unusual, extraordinary book, born from the author of Volver la vista atrás , Juan Gabriel Vásquez , perhaps the most important writer in the Spanish language since Mario Vargas Llosa, one of his teachers . It starts from a true event, the death of a Colombian artist who was a friend of Gabriel García Márquez. After vicissitudes that turn her life into a novel, she died in Paris, where she frequented the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabo very briefly recounted this death in one of his articles published by the Spanish newspaper El País .

The then very young reader of Gabo, his fellow countryman Juan Gabriel Vásquez, was left with that allusion , investigated everything he could about the life (and death) of this unusual artist and the result was this book that now appears in Alfaguara (and in the world of books) as one of Vásquez's great works.

Juan Gabriel Vázquez explains the circumstances that finally led to this work that once again shows him as an exciting and extraordinary prose writer : “One of the reasons why it took me 27 years to write this book was because I first needed certain experiences, to know certain experiences in order to write Feliza’s life, and among those experiences was sadness, having gone through moments of anxiety, of difficulty, of fear, of sadness, of dissatisfaction, of failure. In a certain sense, it took me so long to write it because I needed to go through the age she was when she died: 48 years old.”

–I wrote: "Gabo in the writing of Juan Gabriel." This book is like completing a sentence by Gabriel García Márquez. That sentence joins yours at the end.

–The whole book stems from a column by García Márquez. I was living in Paris. I was 23 years old and had the absurd idea of ​​being a writer, and by chance I opened that book with the column that says: “The Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn died of sadness in a Paris restaurant.” I wondered who Feliza was, why I hadn't heard of her, why García Márquez dedicated an entire column to her, but above all, why he could say that: that she died of sadness. It wasn't a medical diagnosis but a novelist's, and you can only respond to that diagnosis with a novel. I'm very happy about what you're saying because the last sentence was, for me, a way of rescuing Feliza from the clutches of her death of sadness and recovering her as the woman she was, famous for her laughter, her extroversion, her joy. In fact, García Márquez talks about all of this. It's one of the seeds of my interest: the contradiction of a woman who has been known all her life for her expansive laughter but who, nevertheless, dies of sadness. That's when the character of a novel is born, when it's contradictory. It's like that entry Chekhov made in one of his diaries: "Idea for a story: A man goes to the casino, wins everything, comes home, and commits suicide." That has to be the origin of a fiction, right? In Feliza's case, it was the same. A woman famous for her laughter dies of sadness, according to García Márquez. Why? The novel is the answer.

–What is your own relationship with sadness?

–It's a material my novels explore. I think that in order to keep it away from my own life, I feel like I also write as an exorcism. Speaking of my first stories, those in The Lovers of All Saints' Day, a friend spoke of an invocation of chaos. I think that's a good thing. In my fiction, I'm constantly invoking everything I don't want to happen to me. One of the reasons it took me 27 years to write this book was because I first needed certain experiences, to know certain experiences, in order to write Feliza's life, and among those experiences was sadness, having gone through moments of anxiety, difficulty, fear, sadness, dissatisfaction, and failure. In a certain sense, it took me so long to write it because I needed to go through the age I was when she died: 48.

–Why would Gabo have noticed that trait, the sadness of Feliza’s death?

García Márquez was also in exile at the time. He had left Colombia, persecuted by the government of Julio César Turbay, and I think he was interested in highlighting the fact that, although Feliza died clinically from a heart attack caused by sustained contact over many years with the fumes from the materials she worked with, she actually also died as a consequence of her forced exile. García Márquez was interested in highlighting the fact that this woman wasn't killed by her respiratory problems; she was also killed by the Colombian government, which persecuted her, expelled her, and forced her to live a life that wasn't hers. He was interested in that claim, and he does it in a very moving way, without indignant denunciations or political propaganda, but through emotions. That phrase leaves a much greater impact than any pamphlet.

–Have you ever wondered why he didn't elaborate further on the origin of the sadness he had detected?

–I've wondered for 27 years why García Márquez didn't write more about this woman. Why he didn't write a chronicle like the one he wrote about Miguel Littin; why he never wanted to paint a political portrait of that moment, as he did with Noticia de un secuestro. The character of Feliza lent itself to many things, but he didn't want to explore it. I've always wondered why. I think it's one of the reasons this novel exists. I also understand literature as a kind of dialogue, an attempt to travel where my masters haven't traveled, a dialogue with the work of my masters.

–At some point in the book, I felt that, like Gabo or Mario Vargas Llosa, you have a special interest in what really happened, not just what you're making up. In both Volver la vista atrás and in this one, there's a desire to account for what really happened to someone. Vargas Llosa, above all, has some books that could be concurrent with this one or some of yours, because he's also meticulous in his search for what happened.

–There are two levels to this answer, three, actually, for me. In my books, I'm a journalist first. They always arise from an act of journalism: the interview, the discovery of certain true circumstances. It's a report I write for my own purposes. That's why I go to where Feliza lived, I walk through the places she walked through, and I went so far as to take sculpture classes at the same academy where she had taken them. That's why the book is structured through conversations with Pablo Leyva, her husband at the time of her death. After the journalist comes the historian who compiles documents, confirms historical facts, and tries to be precise in reconstructing a public past. And thirdly comes the novelist. The novelist's sole purpose is to say something that neither the historian nor the journalist could have said. I'm writing a novel about Feliza's life rather than a biography because I believe the novel goes places that a biography can't. Just as journalism does many things better than the novel, the novel can do things that journalism cannot. In this step, my interest is absolute precision, the veracity of the details: what would Feliza have seen from the doors of the academy where she studied as a teenager in New York? What was the inside of the academy where she studied in Paris like? This precision of the data is the framework within which I feel free to invent, and what I invent is Feliza's emotional reality, the invisible side of all that visible life I've previously recounted as a journalist and as a historian. That is to say, to properly invent the life of a human being who really existed, to invent as a novelist and for it to be a fair invention of that life to which I pay homage, I first need to pay homage to her as a journalist and be as precise as I can with the data that reality allows me to have.

–In fact, you manage to describe the impact of a piece of information over nearly 300 pages. You stored that information over time until you felt energetic enough to pursue it; it's pure journalism. In the world of noise, that journalism is silent journalism, which ultimately has consequences.

–Marguerite Yourcenar tells how she tried to write Memoirs of Hadrian at twenty, then at thirty, and failed both times. She was only able to write it at forty because it was essential to have lived through certain things, to have accumulated certain experiences, in order to better understand Hadrian. The same thing happened to me with Feliza. Certain experiences were necessary to write about her, I think, but a literary apprenticeship was also necessary: ​​learning to transform the life of a real person through fiction or learning to read it, to interpret it, through fiction. It was something I wouldn't have been able to do when I received the news of García Márquez's column, nor when I wrote The Informers or The Sound of Things Falling . I needed to write other novels like Looking Back , by Sergio Cabrera, to know how to confront this real life, to understand how a real life is transformed through fiction.

–The text is one thing, and the rhythm is another, and the rhythm of this book is almost poetic. In the early 1990s, there was a European obsession with slowness; there was even a book titled In Praise of Slowness . Reading this book, I felt like you could have written a fast-paced book, but instead, you've written a eulogy to the slowness of life, a story to tell.

–The book is the opposite exercise of Looking Back , which moves at an enormous speed. Here I've tried to do the opposite, shift down a gear and drive more slowly. It's a book concentrated in three chronological moments: one, the Paris of the narrator, which is me; another, the last day of Feliza's life, told with obsessive slowness, narrating that last day almost hour by hour; and then the most important moments of her past life. But the impression I wanted to convey is a certain concentration on the life of a person to whom I pay homage through long and sustained attention, something that is almost a luxury today. Sustained attention: that is what I ask of the reader. Let them use this novel as a kind of reminder of the values ​​that lie in patience and in the slow discovery of another's life, as opposed to the constant and superficial nibbling that our contemporary life seems to demand of us.

–There are several factors in the book, one is obviously the literature, another is the people in the book, and then there's life, you feel sorry for these people's lives as a reader.

–Yes. This novel is an act of compassion.

–How did you feel that this woman you had never met could be like?

–That's the effort of the novel. I tried to do something I didn't do in Looking Back : to stage the act of imagining someone else. That's why I appear as the narrator, why I reveal the mechanisms: I'm talking to her husband, investigating certain things in certain places, but at a certain point there's a leap into Feliza's inner life, and we begin to read the novel from her consciousness, from her point of view. This interested me because I wanted to tell the reader that what I'm doing here is an act of imagining the other. I'm interested in knowing how the world looked from her eyes, from her emotions, from her consciousness, and, as far as possible, getting close to what she suffered. Something that comes from the same primal emotion of the fiction writer: curiosity about others. As Ford Madox Ford said: What the novel allows us is to know how others live their entire lives. The word "entire" fascinates me. I'm not only interested in Feliza's life as an artist, her public life, her visible life, but her entire life; also her emotional life, her psychological life, her life as a woman, as a couple, and as a mother. And all that research is what builds the novel, all that curiosity, which is an act of imagination on the part of the other, I find fascinating and it's what I think the novels that interest me most have. It's the same thing Flaubert does with Madame Bovary or Tolstoy with Anna Karenina : that stubborn will to imagine someone who is not what you are.

–Apart from her country, which was yours, what other events caused Feliza's sadness?

Feliza's life is marked by moments of great emotional richness, traumatic moments that defined her life from the beginning. The political life of the country that sent her into exile is the most obvious. But the novel is also written to reflect on the traces left by other previous sorrows: the breakup of her first family, her first husband, who violently opposed her becoming an artist and took her daughters, whom she adored, depriving her of her life with them. Then, when she was experiencing a passionate love affair with Jorge Gaitán Durán, he died in a plane crash in the same year, the same month that her father died. And years later, in a traffic accident, one of her great friends, the sculptor and painter Beatriz Daza, died. Another of her closest friends, the critic Marta Traba, died in 1983 in a plane crash at Barajas Airport. So it's as if the world around Feliza is marked by a kind of tragedy, and these are communicating vessels that affect her life.

–What was happening in your country then for her to be persecuted in such an abrupt and abrupt manner?

–After the Cuban revolution, several revolutionary guerrilla groups emerged in my country. Three were of peasant origin and operated in rural areas of Colombia; but in the 1970s, an urban guerrilla group, the M-19, was formed in Bogotá. It gained notoriety through high-profile acts—the theft of Simón Bolívar's sword, for example. By 1978, it had become a real threat to the government of Julio César Turbay. But the government managed this threat through an extremely repressive law, the Security Statute, which allowed it to persecute anything even vaguely leftist and to commit countless abuses and violations. Many Colombian artists close to leftist groups fell into this web of McCarthyist paranoia, including García Márquez, who, in 1981, discovered a plot to arrest him, was forced to leave the country, and went into exile in Mexico. A few months later, Feliza was arrested on fictitious, fabricated, or illegitimate charges. She was detained and blindfolded in the Army stables for more than a day. She emerged from that arrest convinced that she was in serious danger and the only solution was exile. She left Colombia with the help of García Márquez, lived with him for two months, and then went to Paris. She wanted to reinvent herself as an artist and reinvent her life. She died a couple of months after arriving. In that Paris, there were Latin American exiles from all over. Latin America was a continent plagued by military dictatorships: those were the years of Videla, Pinochet, the dictatorship in Brazil, the civil-military dictatorship in Uruguay; even democratic regimes like Colombia's had highly repressive laws, worthy of a dictatorship. That was the moment I also wanted to reconstruct.

–Two young Latin Americans went to Paris to see what it was like to be a writer. You went to Paris to see what it was like to tell a story started by one of those two writers, Gabriel García Márquez; the other writer was Mario Vargas Llosa. That young man, Juan Gabriel, wrote this book, and to write it, he went to Paris and brought Faulkner, Vargas Llosa, Borges, and Gabo in his suitcase. Is that young man still the one who thought he was going to be a writer? Does the fact that you wrote this book with such care, enthusiasm, and time indicate that you haven't aged?

–I think it indicates that I'm still in touch with that vocation, don't you? I still have a very vivid memory of those first attempts, of my first failures, of my anxiety about knowing if this literary thing was really for me. And this book, in a certain sense, was also settling accounts with that young man who arrived in Paris at 23, just as Feliza arrived at 23 to study sculpture. I arrived in Paris to write Feliza's novel when I was only two years older than she was when she arrived in Paris to die. Those symmetries interested me enormously. The novel has also helped me measure the distance between the two cities: the Paris I arrived in pursuit of a literary mythology and the Paris in which I wrote it. I was going through a difficult time, marked by a few days of an illness that the doctors couldn't diagnose and that became a source of anxiety and problems for several months. During those days, I discovered García Márquez's column. So there is a very direct emotional connection with that Paris of 1996, when I was just beginning to fantasize about writing novels.

–Pablo, Feliza's last husband, told you he liked your book. Sergio and his sister also liked what you wrote about their lives. Why did people directly involved in the story you tell feel you portrayed them well? What is it about you that portrays them well?

–I think they detect a genuine effort to understand them. It's a novelist's effort, which means it's not made to morally judge anyone, but rather an effort to pay homage to a real life. Proust says that a book should be like a lens that allows the reader to see themselves, and if the reader finds within themselves what the book says, that is the proof of the book's truth. I hope Pablo, Sergio, and Marianella found a truth in the books: a literary sense, not a factual sense. A moral truth: the feeling that the book sees and interprets them clearly. I think that's part of the reason they felt fairly portrayed.

–You're already a master of fiction. Where is the inevitable fiction in this book?

–Surely in Feliza's interpretation: the reading of what wasn't visible in the biographical details she left us. Feliza lived a very public life; she was frequently interviewed by the media, pages and chronicles were written about her. But there's a hidden side to that visible life that's only accessible through the literary imagination. Fiction is an exercise in reading, in interpreting another, almost in modeling someone else's life. While I was writing this novel about a sculptor, I liked recalling that definition of the verb "pretend" in Rufino José Cuervo's Colombian dictionary: "To model, to give shape to something." So, writing fiction is also sculpting with a material that already exists, as in the case of this novel.

–“It’s restorative to remember her. This book is true.”

– Well, this book has, right, it's my...

–They've said it about your book, and Pablo has said it, and you have said it on the radio.

–For me, the idea that fiction can be restorative is important…

–I mean the book is restorative, restorative is remembering her as she was and that this reparation indicates that the book is true.

–Felice's life was interrupted, leaving a wound in many people: in her husband Pablo, in the art world, in the country's politics. If the book is in some way a remedy for that wound, if it mends it, I'm more than satisfied. That could be one of the goals of literature, right? To somehow compensate for the errors of reality. No one writes if they're perfectly content with reality: we write because we're dissatisfied, because reality is imperfect, it's broken, and we have to put it in order.

–The book doesn't end with her death. That ending might be gimmicky, but you continue to write about her throughout the final pages of the book. What kept you thinking that the book didn't end when she died?

–Everything that happens after Feliza's death is very seductive for a novelist: a snowstorm prevents her body from arriving in Colombia on time, they have to wait for it… I imagined Pablo, his mother, his sisters, waiting for the plane to return a lifeless body so they could bury it and pay proper tribute. It seemed full of meaning to me, this wait for a woman who has touched everyone's lives and who unites them, perhaps on one of the very rare occasions when they were all together under the same roof: Pablo, Feliza's daughters, her mother, her sister, and the friends who surrounded her. She was a woman who always summoned an enormous amount of affection. She was always surrounded by her friends; her house was a place of endless revelry where García Márquez, Alejandro Obregón, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, and Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda sang boleros until five in the morning. There is a photo of Cobo Borda with Obregón, Feliza and García Márquez.

–Cobo Borda seemed immortal.

–Yes. He also had that same vital energy, a curiosity…

–The joy of meeting people.

–Yes, until her last day, she was writing short essays about the latest writer emerging in Colombia. She was interested in him, she read him and wrote about him. Feliza brought these people together. Her life and her home were a meeting place for all of them. Remembering this is another reason why I've stayed with her for so many pages after her death. That's why the novel says that something unusual happened at her funeral: underground communists coexisted with retired military officers, and television actors with conservative politicians. Feliza was that person, a meeting place for people.

–At very specific moments in the book, and with some frequency, the writer and the person come together to write what's inside you and that isn't only in what you tell, for example: "When the two believed like mistaken angels that their common destiny was happiness," it seems to me that you're tying them to life, so that what you're really telling doesn't happen.

–I think there's a consciousness within the novel that not only tries to organize the material, but also participates emotionally in it. There I am, trying to inhabit it, to see the world from its perspective, but also to be, at the same time, the narrator of a novel that feels compassion for it, that understands the novel as an exercise in compassion and curiosity about another's life. All of this has to happen simultaneously.

–On page 218, I noted in the margin: Excellent story. It's a story that could live alone in a book or on a wall: “Two months later, when Feliza and Pablo returned from their trip, Luis Junca gave them a small box containing three pieces of metal. He'd had so much free time, so many empty hours in such a large house and such long nights, that he ended up almost unconsciously taking apart the gun to see what it was like inside.” The text continues, and at the end one says: “Juan Gabriel and Gabo agreed to write this part of the book.”

–It's an episode in her life that explores something close to my heart: how Feliza was, in a sense, a plaything of chance. The military ultimately justifies her arrest with charges of illegally carrying a weapon, and that charge is justified by the fact that they find the disassembled pistol among her things. A pistol that's useless for anything, much less for shooting anyone. It's a pistol that had been a gift from someone at a time when Feliza traveled alone a lot in Bogotá and a friend felt she needed to be protected. A pistol disassembled by an unskilled security guard, and all the hazards of her life seemed to conspire to play a trick on her. I wanted to recount that episode so that it would have a certain autonomy as a story, so I'm very glad you noticed that.

–Juan Gabriel Vásquez returns to the book, and not only as the narrator of the book, but as a person who wrote it feeling: “No, Feliza was not an open book and here I was, nevertheless, trying to capture her or rather trying to enclose her in prose, as the poem by Emili Dickinson says.”

–A beautiful poem: "They lock me up in their prose, like when I was a child they locked me in the closet so I'd be quiet." And then she says how the confinement is completely useless because through her imagination she can escape from confinement, like a bird. Writing this novel was also the impression that Feliza was constantly escaping the confinement I wanted to impose on her in my words, from my attempt to capture her in a novel. She was a contradictory, ambiguous woman, a woman of bourgeois origins but leftist, a leftist woman who refused any kind of militancy: she refused to join the Communist Party, she never approved of political violence… So she had many sides, many edges, and in the attempt to capture her, I realized that she was tremendously difficult to understand, to contain, to put in a box. That makes her doubly fascinating for a novelist. In the end, at a certain point in my research, I discovered an extraordinary document, a manuscript in which her mother recalls her life after Feliza died. It ends by saying: “My daughter Feliza was an open book.” I allow myself to say in the novel that I don't believe that: my experience is quite the opposite, and that's why it's worth writing a novel about her.

–Maybe the mother was afraid to continue telling.

The names of Feliza, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Alfaguara).