Volume 1 No. 11, August 2019 ESSAY The Character's Skin Alonso Cueto Fiction is a consequence of a writer’s curiosity about life. I don’t think a writer’s interest is life in general. What matters to a writer is the concrete gallery of human beings and the intricate web of relationships that brings them together. The people, so different among themselves, whom we meet over the course of our experience, who intrigue us, move us, repel us and attract us through their words, through their conduct, through their silences. We imagine their dreams, their secrets, their clandestine experiences. That is why we construct characters around them and around ourselves, to satisfy our fascination. The driving force behind this construction is an obsessive curiosity. Who are they? Who are we, living alongside them? Writing is an inner process, foreign, at first, to words. This process is based on the dreams, the silences, the solitudes, the experiences that come before writing: a character appears in our imagination, that character has a face, they speak and act, they have ideas, emotions, desires and frustrations, fears, phobias, pleasures, urges; features appear, arms and a torso, a voice, clothes, a gait, a character who is unique, distinct from all other human beings, not a prototype or a stereotype or a concept or the incarnation of a moral or ideological argument. The birth of a character, like the birth of any human being, in an exceptional process. A writer is only interested in people who are well defined, different from all others, in whose existence the writer firmly believes. Predicting, perceiving, feeling the images, the sounds, the skin of the characters as concrete experiences: these are the starting points of fiction. This is a long and fascinating process. Defining the physical form of their secrets and terrors, their frustrations, anxieties, and urges all while they see themselves in the mirror of their actions: this is a singular experience, unrepeatable with every repetition. Perhaps Borges understood it better than anyone in “The Circular Ruins,” the story of a creator’s dream. All of this, which comes before the words, is what makes a writer commit to a character. Some say characters resemble their authors. This might be true, but often authors are also the characters they never could be: some of the most timid and pusillanimous writers create valiant, determined heroes to atone for themselves. The most cerebral writers invent deranged, irresponsible, savage characters to become, within them, what they could not be in real life. One writes about what one is not. Then, when the words come, when the time comes to organize the sentences that best serve them, that do them justice and properly inform them, this character ends up taking shape, acquiring an identity. This is only possible because the character already existed as a living being in the writer’s imagination. In his wonderful book El ángel literario [The literary angel], Eduardo Halfon cites Marguerite Duras as she declares that the writer “writes to discover what he would write if he were to write.” Perhaps this curiosity, the desire to know who you are, is one of the motives of the creator. Duras also gives us the idea that the act of writing, like the act of reading, always goes along with solitude, and that solitude always goes along with madness. This constructive madness has two essential characteristics. One of them is obsession. The other is schizophrenia. Sustained, uninterrupted obsession with a fictitious story, with imaginary characters, is an essential need for any novelist who takes himself seriously. This obsession is what gives the writer his devotion to the habits of thinking, of writing, of editing. Only by writing every day can we support the life of a work in the face of the other, the vast life lived off the page, the life that nourishes us and that we wish to overcome. A writer feels the continuous, sustained fire of an obsession. A writer writes every day, never hurried and never desperate, as Isak Dinesen would have wanted. His life is a life of well planned vertigo. He wakes up thinking of what he’s going to write and he goes to sleep dreaming of what he has written. He has no fixed schedule because he is writing in front of the screen and imagining sentences and experiences far from it. His method is the consequence of madness integrated into the world. No one can explain the origins of this madness in the form of obsession. A deep dissatisfaction with life and an attempt to challenge death are sufficient causes to seek shelter in a landscape that is immortal par excellence. Words fly like angels imbued with life. They are not tied to matter and decay. They are uniquely able to defeat time. But schizophrenia is just as necessary. The ability to wear the skin of different characters, to understand the whole gallery of living human beings that populates a story, to enter their skin and their mind, is essential. I think of Joseph Conrad, who in The Secret Agent put on the skin of Adolf and Winnie Verloc, of Ossipon, of the Professor and of all the other characters of that great, schizophrenic novel. Like any writer, Conrad tried to organize a gallery of the human, in which he was all of the characters and none of them. II The protagonists of the novels that interest me do not wonder about the meaning of life or the nature of time or the essence of love. They ask none of the great questions of existence. In reality, the characters I like always ask themselves one single question: “What do I do now?” The threshold of action is crucial. The characters make decisions. They act in the face of the threats and affronts of the life they live. They act, they project, they search. They react. Those are the characters that catch my interest. In one of the early passages of The Blue Hour, Adrián Ormache finds the letter that the kidnappers sent to his mother. When Adrián discovers the existence of a woman who was held prisoner by his father during the war with Shining Path, he asks himself this question. What am I going to do now that I know my father kept a prisoner and then freed her? How am I going to find out what happened? How am I going to find Miriam? If I find her, if she tells me what happened, will I be able to find out who I am? The answer to these questions is the driving force behind the story. When Lali, the protagonist of La segunda amante del rey [The king’s second lover], sitting on her bed one Sunday morning, gets a visit from her husband, telling her he’s going to leave her for a younger woman, her response is immediate: she’s going to find someone to seduce her husband’s lover. Her will, her freedom, her capacity to make decisions is what gets the plot rolling and what reveals who she is. When, in El susurro de la mujer ballena [The whisper of the whale woman], Verónica is harassed by Rebeca, her old classmate, after twenty-five years, she also decides to respond to this affront from the past. A character can also decide to make no decision at all, as is frequent in Kafka. Indecision is also adventure. There is no good narrative without a sense of adventure. The answer to the question “What do I do now?” might surprise the characters themselves, and their author. Their reaction, when some essential part of their life comes under threat, reveals to us who they are. I don’t believe we must define every character. Doubts, contradictions, and unanswered questions are the most accurate definitions. Questions about characters (who they are, what matters to them, what they would give their lives for) only lead us to new questions. Narrative is an exploration, not an interpretation or an explanation. A writer enters a dark room and, bit by bit, he lights up some of the shapes and objects he finds there. Words like Goodness, Beauty, and Justice are useless to him. Some people are too intelligent and serene and well balanced to be writers. Being a writer requires a sort of madness and irrationality, even if it remains hidden. Madness always flows, like a current, between the lines. In the process of building this organized madness, this whole novel, a writer is never a specialized professional. When he writes, the writer does it all. He must be an architect, and engineer, a mason and a decorator. He must plan out a story, manufacture the bricks, put them in their place and then polish the prose into music that aspires to be eternal. The house that invites the reader in requires many phases and levels of construction, and its planning and execution take time. The methodical madness of a creator is a maelstrom of contradictions. A writer must be a cold, calculating planner and, at the same time, a little child excited by his characters’ deeds. The “splinter of ice” in every writers’ heart, as Graham Greene called it, must dissolve and melt into the scenes in which he is moved by the fate of one of his characters. He must also have the innocence of a child, in the words of Goethe. The writer’s relationship with language is also multifaceted. He must be attentive to the meaning of words, their shades and senses, yet he must never lose sight of the sensuality of their music. He is a psychologist who knows the souls of his protagonists, but he is also a builder who erects structures and a musician who plays the violin and the drums through which his sounds flow. He is a manipulator who organizes time in the story, and who favors tales in which surprise and intrigue give velocity and depth to the story. He is a storyteller and an explorer of deep identities. He has wings and roots. He digs and he flies. He upholds truths just as he doubts them. And why does he write? He writes because his characters matter to him, their fate matters to him, what they say, what they think, the way they confront life and death: all these things matter to him. The cold of their skin when they come face to face with danger or solitude, the way they behave when they are threatened down to the most precious part of themselves. Entering into their lives, cutting the slices of flesh and blood of their bodies and minds, is a precious adventure that helps us to get to know ourselves and to get to know what reality there is in fantasy and what fantasy there is in reality. Thanks to this adventure, we have gained a treasure realer than any other: we have gained hope. But we can only reach hope through our senses. We feel hope thanks to a character we can see, touch, feel. III I am interested in all the senses, but I’m most fascinated by the ability to see. I would like to create a language capable of visually reproducing actions, characters, and sceneries. Many of the writers I like most—Austen, James, Flaubert—are great creators of images. They gave us precise portraits of Elinor and Darcy, of Isabelle Archer, of Madame Bovary. When we read those novels, it’s as if we are seeing them. Achieving this feat of vision through words seems to me the most prodigious miracle of all. Perhaps for this reason, when I write my novels, especially at the start, I take photos of the places and sometimes of the people that I believe will be the places and people of my fiction. To write The Blue Hour, I traveled several times to Ayacucho. I took photos of the path from Huanta to Huamanga, and of the Huanta stadium, which was once a concentration camp, and of the main plaza of that city, halfway between the mountains and the forest. These were the places that Miriam and Adrián saw, the places where they went. I wanted to be there with them. The same can be said of the character of Delia in La pasajera [The passenger]. I took photos of the Chorrillos beachfront and that store beside her house and her hair salon and the corner of Surquillo, by the Zanjón, where she appears in one of the first scenes of the book. Before writing Grandes miradas [Great gazes], thanks to a friend who worked for the National Intelligence Service, I was able to visit the former accommodations of Vladimiro Montesinos, even his jacuzzi (I resisted the temptation to get in, luckily). I also took photos of the street and the house where a judge once lived: a judge who served as the inspiration for Guido Pazos. On one occasion, a group of guys showed up throwing insults and threats in my direction, and I had to get out of there. I also look for photos of people who, in my opinion, might resemble my characters. Sometimes I write with the photos to one side of the screen. I don’t want to reproduce every one of their details, just to do what the images do: to transmit an irreparable truth. It seems to me that one of the goals of a novel is to produce the sensation of being in a place. In one great essay, Virginia Woolf imagines a character called Mrs. Brown, who says to the writer: “Catch me if you can.” According to Woolf, a writer sometimes catches a part of a character’s body, maybe the tip of a finger or a toe, but doesn’t always capture them completely. The story of literature, from Achilles and Homer to Stephen Dedalus and Joseph K., is the story of characters, of the writer’s ability to capture them in the form of words. They are truly captured when the writer makes us see them. We see Achilles with his shining shield, preparing to challenge Paris, and we also see the darkness of the corridors down which we walk with the protagonist of The Trial. The writer’s ability to make us feel that we are them (we are Don Quixote, we are Captain Ahab, we are Santiago Zavala, we are Emma Zunz) is one of the great feats of literature. We may never attain this feat, but we will keep trying, and thus we will spend our lives. Alonso Cueto (Lima, 1954) has written nineteen books, most of which are fiction. Some of his novels include La Hora Azul (2005 Herralde Prize for Novel), El Susurro de la Mujer Ballena (2007), La Segunda Amante del Rey (2017), and his most recent, La Perricholi. Reina de Lima (2019). Three of Cueto’s novels have been made into films. His works have been translated into eighteen languages. He has received a Guggenheim Writers Grant and the Peruvian Government Medal for Service to Culture. He is a member of the Peruvian Academy of Language. Arthur Dixon works as a translator and as Managing Editor of Latin American Literature Today. His translation of Andrés Felipe Solano’s “The Nameless Saints” (WLT, Sept. 2014) was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize, and his most recent project is a book-length translation of Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s Cuidados intensivos (see WLT, Sept. 2016).
